Operations All Levels 5 min daily Tested March 2026

The 5-Minute AI Assistant Health Check You Should Run Every Morning

Most people set up an AI assistant, let it run, and assume it's working. Then one day they realize it stopped doing things days ago and they have no idea when.

AI assistants break in quiet ways. An API key expires. A config file gets overwritten. A cron job drifts. The assistant keeps "running" but isn't doing anything useful. You only notice when something important doesn't happen.

Five minutes every morning catches almost all of this before it causes problems. Here's the exact checklist.

The Check (Do These in Order)

1. Did it run overnight? (60 seconds)

Open your assistant's log file and look at the timestamps:

tail -30 ~/your-assistant/logs/agent.log

You should see entries from the past few hours. If the most recent entry is from yesterday afternoon, something stopped it.

PassLogs show activity from the overnight window.

FailNo recent entries, or the file is empty.

2. Is the AI model connection working? (60 seconds)

Your assistant talks to an AI model to do its work. If that connection is broken, the assistant is basically brain-dead — it'll go through the motions but can't think or respond.

Quick test for Claude (Anthropic):

curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://api.anthropic.com/v1/messages \
 -H "x-api-key: $ANTHROPIC_API_KEY" \
 -H "anthropic-version: 2023-06-01" \
 -H "content-type: application/json" \
 -d '{"model":"claude-3-5-haiku-20241022","max_tokens":5,"messages":[{"role":"user","content":"hi"}]}'

PassReturns 200.

Fail401 = key invalid. 429 = rate limited. Timeout = provider outage.

Note: This costs about $0.00001 per test. Run it daily — it's worth it to catch an expired key before it breaks something important.

3. Did the scheduled tasks complete? (60 seconds)

If your assistant runs daily tasks (morning briefing, nightly report, etc.), confirm they actually produced output. Check for today's file:

Checks 3–5 + Automation Setup

The remaining checks cover scheduled task verification, tool access validation, memory file health — plus the one-time setup that turns this 5-minute manual check into a fully automated morning alert.

Check 3: Scheduled task output verification
Check 4: Tool & integration access test
Check 5: Memory file health check
Automation: cron script that runs all 5 checks and texts you failures
Free monitoring services: healthchecks.io, BetterUptime setup

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