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Agent Scheduling

Workbench can persist agent wakeups and recurring routines in its app database. Scheduled prompts are owned by a chat session and fire through the same send pipeline as a normal user message, so tray state, notifications, transcript persistence, and provider selection stay consistent.

When the built-in Workbench MCP bridge is available, agents can use these native tools:

ToolPurpose
ScheduleWakeupSchedule a one-shot wakeup with delaySeconds or fireAt, plus a prompt and optional reason.
CronCreateCreate a routine from a standard 5-field cron expression in local time.
CronListList persisted wakeups and routines.
CronDeleteDelete a routine by id or name.
MonitorSubscribe to future output lines from a background task (Bash run_in_background, a backgrounded Agent/subagent, or a Workflow) instead of polling.

Wakeups and routines survive app restarts. If a fire time passes while Workbench is closed, the scheduler fires the overdue task when the app starts again.

When an agent starts work in the background — a Bash command with run_in_background, a backgrounded Agent/subagent, or a Workflow — Workbench watches the task and automatically re-invokes the agent when it finishes, so the agent reports the result back to you without needing a manual nudge. This works for every background task type the agent can launch, not just Bash, and long-running tasks are waited on until they complete rather than being abandoned.

If the owning workspace is archived, deleted, or otherwise has no worktree when a task comes due, Workbench pauses the task instead of retrying it forever. The Automation settings row and routine list payload include the disabled reason and last error so you can delete or recreate the routine deliberately.

The CLI exposes routines for automation and scripts:

Terminal window
workbench routine list
workbench routine create <session-id> "0 9 * * 1-5" "Check open PRs" --name weekday-prs
workbench routine create <session-id> "30 14 28 2 *" "Review the launch checklist" --once
workbench routine run weekday-prs
workbench routine delete weekday-prs

routine create accepts literal prompts, @file prompts, and - for stdin, matching chat send.


Original source: utensils.io/claudette