| name | cron |
| description | Schedule work to run later or on a repeating cadence — either a reminder delivered to the user, or a task the agent runs and reports back. Use when the user says things like "remind me to…", "every morning", "every Monday at 9", "each hour", "once at a given time", or otherwise wants a one-off or recurring scheduled job. |
Cron
Use the cron tool to schedule reminders or recurring tasks.
Boundary: cron executes on a clock. If the recurring work must react to more than
the clock — wake on matching messages or webhooks, chain off another run's outcome,
pursue a verifiable life condition until it's achieved — that is an automation,
not a cron job: read the automations skill.
Mode: reminder vs task
The mode parameter (default reminder) controls what happens when the job fires:
- reminder — the
message is delivered to the user as a brief, natural message.
- task — the
message is a task description; the agent executes it with full tools
and delivers the result only if it produced something useful.
mode is independent of the schedule. A one-time job is just a job with an at schedule
(it auto-deletes after running), in either mode.
Schedule (pick one)
| User says | Parameters |
|---|
| every 20 minutes | every_seconds: 1200 |
| every hour | every_seconds: 3600 |
| every day at 8am | cron_expr: "0 8 * * *" |
| weekdays at 5pm | cron_expr: "0 17 * * 1-5" |
| 9am Vancouver time daily | cron_expr: "0 9 * * *", tz: "America/Vancouver" |
| once, at a specific time | at: ISO datetime string (compute from current time) |
Use tz with cron_expr for a specific IANA timezone. Without tz, the server's local
timezone is used.
Optional: run as a specific model or persona
Run the job as a specific model or a persona — mutually exclusive, set one or neither:
model — a model preset/ref (route a heavy recurring task to a cheaper or stronger model).persona — a named persona (its SOUL + model), so the job runs with that voice and model.
Omit both to use the agent's default. (For update, providing one switches the job to it.)
Optional: name and silent delivery
name — short human-readable label for the job (defaults to the first 30 chars of the
message). On update, providing it renames the job.deliver — default true: the job's result is delivered to the user's channel. Set
false for a silent background task (e.g. maintenance that only needs to run, not
report). On update, providing it toggles delivery.
Examples
Reminder (default mode):
cron(action="add", message="Time to take a break!", every_seconds=1200)
Task — agent executes each time:
cron(action="add", mode="task", message="Check HKUDS/durin GitHub stars and report", every_seconds=600)
Task on a specific model:
cron(action="add", mode="task", model="<model-ref>", message="Summarize today's commits", cron_expr="0 18 * * 1-5")
One-time reminder:
cron(action="add", message="Remind me about the meeting", at="<ISO datetime>")
List / update / remove:
cron(action="list")
cron(action="update", job_id="abc123", mode="task")
cron(action="remove", job_id="abc123")
Notes
list shows each job's recent run history (time, status, duration). System jobs (e.g.
the daily memory dream) are visible but cannot be removed.- Enabling/disabling a job and running it on demand are web-dashboard actions (Cron
panel) — this tool does not expose them. The dashboard can also create and edit jobs.
