Scheduled Tasks

Scheduled tasks let you set up recurring or one-shot Claude prompts that run on a schedule. Describe what you want in natural language, and Claude creates the schedule using MCP tools.

Creating a task

Just tell the bot what you want scheduled:

Check the deployment status every 30 minutes and tell me if anything is failing.

Claude will call the create_schedule MCP tool to set it up. You’ll get a confirmation with the task name, schedule, and context.

You can also be more specific:

Every weekday at 9am, summarize the git log from the last 24 hours.

In 2 hours, remind me to review the PR.

Schedule types

Interval

Runs repeatedly at a fixed interval:

• 30m — every 30 minutes
• 1h — every hour
• 2d — every 2 days
• 90s — every 90 seconds (but see minimum below)

Minimum interval: 5 minutes. Anything shorter is rejected.

Cron

Standard 5-field cron expressions:

• 0 9 * * 1-5 — weekdays at 9:00 AM
• */30 * * * * — every 30 minutes
• 0 0 1 * * — first of each month at midnight

The minimum gap between fire times must be at least 5 minutes.

One-shot

Runs once at a specific time, then auto-deletes:

• ISO 8601 format: 2026-03-21T09:00:00
• Times are in UTC (naive datetimes treated as UTC)
• Skipped if the time is already past when the bot starts

What tasks can do

Scheduled tasks run in isolated sessions with read-only tools:

• Read, Glob, Grep — explore the codebase
• WebSearch, WebFetch — access the web
• Bash — only if the context has a sandbox enabled

Tasks cannot use mutating tools (Edit, Write) or interactive approval — they run unattended.

Limits and safety

Constraint	Value
Minimum interval	5 minutes
Max tasks per chat	20
Max concurrent executions	3 (global)
Default timeout per task	10 minutes
Max instances of same task	1 (skipped if still running)

If a task exceeds its timeout, it’s cancelled and you get a notification with the duration. If it throws an error, you get the error message (first 200 characters).

Managing tasks

List tasks

/schedule

Shows all scheduled tasks for the current chat with their name, schedule, context, timeout, and prompt preview.

Delete a task

Ask Claude:

Delete the deployment check schedule.

Or use the command directly:

/schedule delete deployment-check

Task output

When a scheduled task runs, its output is sent to the chat (or forum topic) where it was created. Each execution gets its own isolated session — it doesn’t share context with your interactive conversations.

Failure notifications

You’ll be notified in the chat when a task fails:

• Timeout — “Task timed out after 10 minutes”
• Error — “Task failed: <error message>”
• Missing context — “Context no longer exists”

One-shot tasks

One-shot tasks run once and auto-delete. They’re useful for reminders or deferred actions:

In 30 minutes, check if the CI pipeline has finished and report the result.

If the bot restarts after the scheduled time has passed, stale one-shot tasks are cleaned up automatically.