pincerhq/pincer/scheduler-briefings

Scheduler and proactive briefings

Pincer has two proactive systems, both driven by a persistent SQLite-backed scheduler:

Morning briefings

A daily briefing is generated per user with up to four sections: weather (OpenWeatherMap), calendar (reuses the calendar tool), email (reuses the email tool), and news (NewsAPI), plus any custom sections the user has configured. Settings live in a briefing_config table per pincer_user_id:

• sections — which of weather/calendar/email/news are included
• custom_sections — user-defined additions
• weather_location — e.g. "Berlin,DE"
• news_topics — e.g. ["technology", "business"]

The briefing time and timezone are global config (briefing_time, default 07:00, and briefing_timezone), not per-user.

If the user wants to change what's in their briefing, update their briefing_config row rather than the global schedule.

Cron scheduler

General-purpose scheduling uses standard cron expressions, persisted so schedules survive restarts, checked every 60 seconds, timezone-aware per schedule. Action handlers are registered by type (briefing, custom, etc.) — when a user asks "remind me every Monday at 9am to...", this is the mechanism to use: create a schedule with a cron expression and an action, not an ad-hoc sleep/loop.

Event triggers (reactive, not scheduled)

Separate from cron, event triggers fire on external events rather than on a schedule: new email arrival, calendar reminders (15 minutes before an event), and custom webhooks. Deduplication prevents the same event from notifying twice. Use these when the user wants "notify me when X happens" rather than "do X at time Y".