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Background Tasks Checklist for AI-Built Apps

Process things without making users wait

When you vibe code background tasks with tools like Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, v0, or Claude Code, the generated code often works in development but misses critical production requirements. This checklist helps you catch what AI missed before you ship.

Danger Zone

high risk

When background tasks fail silently, your app looks like it's working but isn't

Running a task in the background seems simple — just fire it off and move on. But what happens when it fails halfway through? How do you know it failed? Does it try again? If a task takes 30 seconds and you get 100 requests at once, do they all run simultaneously and crash your server? Background tasks are invisible until they break, and when they break, the symptoms show up somewhere completely different — missing emails, stale data, incomplete reports.

Failure scenario

You built a feature that sends a summary email every night at midnight. It works perfectly for two months. Then your email service has a 10-minute outage at 12:03 AM. Your background task fails once and never runs again — no retry, no notification. Three weeks later a customer asks why they stopped getting emails and you realize hundreds of users have been missing them. You have no logs and no way to tell who missed what.

Common mistakes

  • Tasks that fail once and never retry — the app just moves on
  • No way to tell if a task succeeded or failed unless you manually check logs
  • Tasks that run forever if something goes wrong (no timeout)
  • Multiple tasks trying to do the same thing at once because there's no lock
  • Putting tasks in a list that gets lost if the server restarts

Time to break: 2-6 months before a silent failure becomes a visible problem

How are you building this?

Showing what to check when using a managed service

Audit Prompts

Copy these into your AI coding assistant to check your implementation.

What happens when a task fails?
reliability
Look at how we've set up our background task service (Inngest, Trigger.dev, etc). Check: If a task fails, does it automatically retry? How many times? Is there a delay between retries that gets longer each time? Are we getting notified when tasks fail repeatedly? Can we see a history of which tasks ran and which failed?

Tasks fail all the time — API timeouts, rate limits, temporary outages. The difference between "retry automatically" and "fail once and give up" is the difference between 99% reliability and constant broken features.

Are tasks properly isolated from each other?
performance
Check how tasks are organized. If one task crashes or runs forever, does it block other tasks from running? Are there timeouts so a stuck task eventually gives up? If we suddenly get 1000 tasks queued up, does the service handle it gracefully or does everything grind to a halt?

One broken task shouldn't bring down your entire background processing system. Without proper isolation, a single stuck task can freeze everything.

Can you debug what happened?
reliability
Look at our task monitoring setup. Can we see which tasks are currently running? Can we look back and see what failed yesterday? Do failed tasks show error messages? Can we manually retry a specific failed task? Is there alerting when tasks start failing at a high rate?

When something breaks at 3 AM, you need to know what broke and why. Without logs and monitoring, you're flying blind.

Are scheduled tasks actually reliable?
reliability
Check our scheduled tasks (cron jobs). If the server restarts or deploys during the scheduled time, does the task still run? If a scheduled task takes longer than the interval (e.g., a 10-minute task that runs every 5 minutes), does it queue up properly or create overlapping runs? Are scheduled tasks in UTC or local time — and does that cause issues with daylight saving time?

Scheduled tasks are easy to set up but hard to get right. Miss one scheduled run and data gets stale or emails don't send.

Checklist

0/10 completed

Smart Move

Use a service

Background task infrastructure is harder than it looks. You need queues, retries, monitoring, scaling, and failure recovery. Services handle all of this and give you a dashboard to see what's happening. Worth it unless you have a very simple use case or need the absolute lowest latency.

Inngest

Event-driven background jobs with built-in retries, scheduling, and a great debugging UI

Up to 100,000 function runs per month free

Trigger.dev

Similar to Inngest with excellent Next.js integration and visual workflow builder

100,000 task runs per month free

Vercel Cron + Queues

If you're already on Vercel, built-in scheduled tasks and queues with zero setup

Included in Vercel's free tier with limits

Tradeoffs

Services add another dependency and usually charge by task volume. Self-hosted options like BullMQ give more control but require managing Redis, deployment, and monitoring yourself.

Did you know?

47% of background job failures are never detected by the application — they fail silently and only surface when users report missing functionality weeks later.

Source: Honeybadger 2023 Background Job Reliability Study

Related Checks

🩺Monitoring

Error tracking and observability

✉️Email

Send transactional and marketing emails

📤Data Export

Let users download their data