Scheduled agents & loops

You don't have to be present for Claude to work. Schedule a task to run on a cadence ("every weekday at 8am, summarize yesterday's support tickets") or have it repeat on a loop until something is done. It runs, does the job, and leaves you the result — like a coworker who handles the standing chores overnight.

There are two shapes to this. A schedule runs a job on a cadence — “every weekday at 8am, summarize yesterday’s support tickets” — like a standing appointment Claude keeps without you. A loop runs the same task over and over until a condition is met — “keep checking the deploy every five minutes and tell me the moment it goes green.” One is for chores that recur on the clock; the other is for waiting on something to happen.

The shift here is that you no longer have to be present for the work. The job runs, does the thing, and leaves you the result — so the standing reports and morning summaries that used to eat the first hour of your day are simply finished when you arrive.

Two habits make this trustworthy. Save the output somewhere you’ll see it — a file, a doc, a message — so finished work is actually waiting, not lost in a log. And start with a task you already trust Claude to do by hand: prove it on the manual version first, then let it run unattended. This is the time-shifted cousin of a hook — a hook fires on an event, a scheduled agent fires on the clock.

Every Monday at 9am, pull last week's numbers and draft the team update.

Keep checking the deploy every 5 minutes and tell me the moment it goes green.