Cron Schedule

A cron schedule in Agenhood is a cron-like cadence attached to a prompt or a task workflow, causing it to run automatically at defined times, either once or on a recurring basis, in a specific timezone.

How it works in Agenhood

A user attaches a schedule to either a single prompt sent to an agent or to an existing task workflow, and defines a cadence for it using cron-style timing, along with a timezone so the schedule fires at the intended local time regardless of where the platform itself is hosted. A schedule can be one-time, firing once at a specified moment, or recurring, firing repeatedly on a pattern such as daily or weekly. The console shows upcoming fires on a calendar, so a user can see at a glance when a given schedule will next run without working out the cron expression by hand. When a schedule fires, Agenhood starts a new agent task, or a new run of the attached workflow, exactly as if it had been triggered manually.

Why it matters

Many agent use cases are naturally recurring: a daily digest, a periodic cleanup pass, a weekly report. A cron schedule turns a prompt or a workflow that already works into something that keeps running without a person having to trigger it each time. Because a scheduled run is a regular agent task or workflow run under the hood, it produces the same event stream, is visible in the live task viewer, and shows up in the same history and metrics as manually triggered work.

Cron Schedule vs Task Workflow

A cron schedule and a task workflow answer different questions: a workflow defines what runs, a sequence of one or more tasks, potentially across multiple agents; a cron schedule defines when it runs. A cron schedule can trigger either a single prompt or a whole workflow, but it does not itself define any ordering of tasks.

Related concepts

Cron based scheduling, using compact expressions to describe recurring times and timezone-aware calculation of the next fire, is a general and long-standing pattern in server and infrastructure automation, going back to the Unix cron utility; Agenhood applies the same mechanism to triggering agent work instead of shell scripts.