A cron job (or scheduled agent run) is a trigger that wakes an agent at a fixed time, in a fresh session, to do work.
Key properties:
- No inherited context. Cron sessions start cold. Whatever the
agent needs to do its job has to be loaded from memory or from files the agent reads at intake.
- Bounded scope. Crons are best for small, well-defined tasks:
daily checks, weekly summaries, scheduled posts, hourly syncs.
- Idempotent when possible. A cron that fires twice for the same
scheduled run should produce the same result, not duplicate work.
A heartbeat is a related pattern: an agent that wakes on a schedule, performs a check-in, and either acts or reports what it found. The daily check-in loop on the Workflows page is the canonical example.