shibing624/agentica/cron

Scheduled jobs

Use the cronjob tool. Do not edit crontab or ~/.agentica/cron/jobs.json by hand. The tool schema lists the actions; do not invent them.

A job runs in a fresh session with none of this conversation. The prompt must be self-contained: goal, constraints, where things are, what to do when blocked. A prompt that needs a follow-up question will stall unattended.

Waiting on something this session started? Not cron.

To learn when a training run, eval, build, or any tmux/nohup job finishes, do not schedule a minute-level poll. Start a read-only watcher with execute(background=True) that loops on the job's exit marker (see the execute tool's tmux/nohup notes). It spends no tokens while it waits, and its exit comes back to this session as a new message.

A cron monitor costs a full agent run per tick and cannot reach this session: one production job polled a 37-hour training run every 6 minutes, 400+ times, and kept polling for four days after the run had ended.

Cron is for work that must recur on a clock or outlive this session.

If a job watches for an end state, it must stop itself

Write the exit condition into the prompt: "when <marker> exists (or the process is gone), report the result and pause this job (its own id) with the cronjob tool". Without it the job keeps firing after there is nothing left to watch.

A job's agent has the CLI's file, shell, web, memory and cronjob tools, and no session of its own. It has no list_agents / send_message / ask_user_question: do not write a prompt that tells it to message a session or ask the user.

Jobs only fire on their schedule while the scheduler daemon is on. How the user turns it on depends on the surface:

• Interactive CLI: they type /cron daemon on. You cannot type slash commands; tell them which one. /cron is also their surface for list / add / pause / run.
• Gateway and other surfaces: cron.enabled in config.yaml is a

deployment-level setting. You cannot toggle it from this conversation; tell the user to ask whoever manages this deployment to enable it.

action='run' executes a job once now so you can show the result before waiting for the schedule.