Cron (Scheduled Trigger)

What is a Cron (Scheduled Trigger)

Cron, or a scheduled trigger, is a fixed-interval recurring dispatch mechanism: it starts a new agent run on a clock, every hour, every morning at a set time, regardless of whether a human is around to kick it off or watch it run. Where a self-paced loop decides its own next run based on what it finds, a cron trigger simply fires on schedule, every time, whether or not anything has actually changed since the last run.

Because nobody is present when a cron-triggered run starts, it is almost always paired with headless mode: the prompt goes in, the harness runs without a live terminal session, and the result is read back out afterward rather than watched turn by turn. This makes cron a natural fit for genuinely repetitive, well-scoped work, a nightly content sync, an hourly status check, where the task and the checks needed to trust the output are both stable and known in advance.

The real risk with cron is not the schedule, it's drift. A cron job runs with whatever credentials and environment were valid when it was set up, and that environment does not update itself just because time passes: an expired token or a changed permission can silently break every future run until someone notices the failure pattern. A cron trigger firing on schedule is not the same guarantee as a cron trigger's output actually being trustworthy, the two have to be checked separately.