Scheduling with routines
A routine is work an agent does on a schedule, without you being there — a morning digest, a poll for new tickets, a reminder, a weekly report.
Who can do what
| Task | User | Agent owner | Admin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ask an agent to schedule something | — as Editor | ✅ | ✅ |
| See an agent's routines | — as Editor | ✅ | ✅ |
| Change or remove a routine | — as Editor | ✅ | ✅ |
Routines are configuration, so a Viewer can neither see nor create them.
You set one up by asking
There is no routines screen. You create, inspect, change, and delete routines by talking to the agent:
"Every weekday at 9am, check the deploy queue and message me if anything has been stuck for more than an hour."
"What are you scheduled to do?"
"Stop the Friday summary — make it Monday morning instead."
The agent has a routine-management capability built in, on every agent, with no tool or bundle to enable first. This is deliberate: scheduling is easier to express in a sentence than in a form, and the agent turns your sentence into the right schedule.
Three kinds of schedule
Each routine uses exactly one:
| Kind | Good for | You'd say |
|---|---|---|
| Interval — every N minutes | Short, drift-tolerant polling | "check my inbox every 15 minutes" |
| Cron — wall-clock and weekday recurrences | Anything tied to a real clock or weekday | "every Wednesday at 7am", "weekdays at 9am" |
| One-shot — fires once, then disables itself | Reminders | "remind me in 30 minutes", "at 7am tomorrow" |
Cron routines carry their own timezone, so "weekdays at 9am" means 9am where you are. If the agent picks the wrong zone, tell it — and check your timezone in User Settings, which is where it looks first.
Write the instruction as a task, not an observation
The most common disappointment is a routine that fires perfectly and does nothing useful, because it was set up to watch rather than to act.
- ❌ "check whether the nightly build passed" — the agent checks, and stops.
- ✅ "check whether the nightly build passed, and if it failed, summarise the error and email it to me"
Say what should happen, including what should happen when there's nothing to report (often: nothing).
Routines cost money and respect budgets
A routine is a real task each time it runs. It draws on the same budgets as interactive work and appears in Usage & spend like anything else.
Two consequences worth internalising:
- An agent that's hit a daily or monthly limit backs off rather than firing and failing. It resumes at the next reset; blocks are recorded in the enforcement audit log.
- A short interval is expensive. "Every 15 minutes" is ~96 tasks a day, every day. If a routine can be hourly, make it hourly — and consider an hourly limit on any agent running frequent routines, so a misconfigured schedule slows down instead of running up a bill.
Checking on them
Ask. "List your routines" returns what's scheduled and when each next runs. Their output appears in the agent's session history like any other task, so you can read what a routine actually did at 6am.