II · Planning & Control FlowMature★★

Scheduled Agent

also known as Cron Agent, Time-Triggered Agent, Periodic Agent

Run the agent on a fixed schedule independent of user requests.

Context

A team needs an agent to do work on a clock — produce an overnight summary, triage incoming issues every Monday morning, run an hourly health check, send a daily competitive-intelligence digest. The work has to happen whether or not a user remembers to ask. A scheduler (cron, a queue with delayed delivery, a managed scheduler service) and durable storage for the agent's state are available.

Problem

Request-driven agents only act when someone calls them; if no user prompts the digest, the digest never goes out. Asking a human to trigger the agent every morning defeats the point of automation. Running the agent continuously in a polling loop wastes most of its budget on idle wakeups. Without persisted state between runs, each scheduled invocation starts from zero and cannot pick up where the previous one left off, so anything that needs continuity (last-seen items, in-progress investigations) is lost.

Forces

  • Schedule density trades cost for freshness.
  • Failure modes when the agent's run is missed.
  • Drift if the schedule is not authoritative.

Example

A product manager wants a daily competitive-intelligence digest in their inbox. Building it as a request-driven agent forces them to remember to ask each morning, which they don't. The team schedules the agent to run at 06:00 cron, read its persisted state (last-seen items), execute its task, write results to email and storage, and exit. The digest now arrives reliably even when no human is awake, and the agent's state survives across runs.

Diagram

Solution

Therefore:

Schedule the agent run at fixed cadence (cron, scheduler service). The agent reads its current state, executes its task, writes results, and exits. State persists across runs in durable storage.

What this pattern forbids. The agent is not invoked by user requests; only the scheduler triggers runs.

The smaller patterns that complete this one —

  • generalisesIntra-Agent Memo Scheduling★— Let an agent drop a note for its own future self at a specified time so present decisions can hand off context to a later run without external infrastructure.

And the patterns that stand alongside it, or against it —

  • alternative-toEvent-Driven Agent★★— Trigger the agent on external events (webhooks, message queues, file changes) instead of user requests or schedules.
  • alternative-toSpec-Driven Loop★— Run the same prompt against a fixed spec in a deterministic outer loop until the spec is satisfied.
  • complementsAgent Resumption★★— Persist agent execution state so a long-running run survives restarts, deploys, or user disconnects.
  • complementsNow-Anchoring·— Ground the agent's reasoning in the current absolute time without requiring tool calls, so every reply is implicitly time-aware.
  • alternative-toMode-Adaptive Cadence★— Vary the agent's loop interval based on current salience so the agent thinks faster when something is happening and slower when nothing is, instead of running on a fixed cron.
  • complementsDurable Workflow Snapshot★— Capture workflow execution state as a snapshot in a pluggable storage provider so a paused run can resume across deployments, process restarts, and host crashes.

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