Introduction to Claude Code Scheduled Tasks

Mar 08, 2026

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3 min read

YouTube video ID: BlNJFa3Btm8

Source: YouTube video by Nate Herk | AI Automation — Watch original video

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Claude Code now includes native scheduled tasks, turning the AI assistant into a 24/7 employee. The new feature makes every process, skill, and built item roughly ten times more powerful, and the setup is described as extremely easy.

Setting Up Scheduled Tasks

Scheduled tasks require the Claude Code desktop app. Users can create a task either by navigating to the Schedule tab and clicking New task, or by typing the /schedule command in any session. Each task is configured with a name, description, prompt, model, mode, and folder selection. Scheduling options include hourly, daily, weekly, or specific times. Once configured, a cron job triggers the session; the agent reads the prompt, works on the project files, and stops automatically when finished.

Agentic Workflows and Self‑Healing

Unlike deterministic Python or TypeScript scripts, scheduled tasks leverage Claude Code’s agentic nature. Agents can read all project files, use available tools, and attempt multiple solutions when errors arise. After fixing an error, the agent updates its own code to avoid repeating the same mistake, removing the user as a bottleneck and allowing the workflow to improve over time.

Deterministic Execution Option

For cases where a predictable outcome is needed, tasks can be set to execute a script deterministically, providing a hybrid approach between agentic flexibility and fixed behavior.

Example: Morning Coffee Task

A simple personal use case involves a “Morning Coffee” skill that plans the day. The task reads the skill, confirms the plan, and automates what was previously a manual step. The setup mirrors the general process: define the prompt, schedule the run, and let the agent handle the execution.

Working with Projects and Skills

Scheduled tasks can integrate with existing projects, such as GitHub repositories. The agent can identify available skills within a project and turn any of them into a scheduled automation, extending the reach of Claude Code across codebases.

Limitations and Gotchas

The computer and Claude Code desktop app must be running for tasks to execute.
If the machine is off, missed tasks are caught up when the app reopens, checking back up to seven days.
Tasks run without supervision, so permissions must be managed carefully to avoid unintended actions.
Each run is stateless; the agent starts a fresh session with no memory of previous runs unless a log file is used.
Tasks may pause if required API keys or permissions are unavailable.

Strategies for Self‑Improvement and Context

Agents can improve themselves by editing their own code when errors occur or by rewriting prompts when opportunities arise. Maintaining a log file provides a form of memory: the agent can read the log at the start of each run to inform its actions. A “lean strategy” uses one file per task, overwriting it with the latest run’s status, duration, and known issues, which is more efficient than continuously appending logs.

Notifications for Task Completion

Desktop app notifications are basic, but users can set up hooks to play a sound when a task finishes. Including in‑prompt instructions to send a message—such as to ClickUp—provides richer notification options.

Desktop App Dependency

Scheduled tasks are currently confined to the desktop app because the cron logic and metadata reside there. Terminal or IDE extensions can edit existing tasks but cannot create or run new ones. Keeping the desktop app open in the background ensures scheduled tasks continue to run.

Future Outlook

Anticipated expansions include broader availability through terminal and IDE extensions, eventually enabling automation of almost any workflow.

Takeaways

Claude Code now offers native scheduled tasks, turning the AI assistant into a 24/7 employee and boosting process power by roughly tenfold.
Tasks are created via the desktop app using either the Schedule tab or the /schedule command, with configurable prompts, models, and timing options.
Agentic workflows enable self‑healing behavior, allowing the AI to read project files, troubleshoot errors, and update its own code without user intervention.
Each scheduled run is stateless, so developers must implement log files or similar mechanisms to provide context for continuous improvement.
Current limitations require the desktop app to stay open on a running computer, but missed runs are recovered within a seven‑day window.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Full Transcript YouTube

Claude Code is now a 247 AI employee,
which means that it is always Cloud Code
O'Olock. And that might be the nerdiest
thing I've ever said. Anthropic has
finally done it and launched scheduled
tasks natively for Claude Code, which
means every single process, every single
skill, everything you've been building
and using inside of Claude Code just got
10 times more powerful. And they
literally could not be easier to set up.
So in today's video, I'm going to show
you exactly how they work and tell you
everything important that you need to
know about them. Let's not waste any
time and get straight into it. So here I
am in cloud code in the cloud desktop
app. Now right now you do need to be
using the desktop app in order to access
these scheduled tasks. Now this
scheduled task feature came out about a
week or two ago in cloud co-work. As you
can see it's basically the exact same
thing. You could create scheduled
automations but now they finally brought
it to cloud code and there's a few ways
that you can set them up. The first way
is you go over here to the schedule tab
and you just click on it and you can see
right here run tasks on a schedule or
whenever you need them. Type / schedule
and any existing session to set one up.
So those are the two ways. You can
either click right here, new task, you
can give it a name, a description, give
it a prompt, you can choose the model
you want it to run on, you can choose
the mode to run on, and you can also
select the folder. And then finally, you
just say, "Hey, I want this to run every
hour, every day, every week, at this
time." Boom. You now have a scheduled
automation. So that cron would basically
fire off, the session would start up,
and then the agent would read the
prompt, it would go through your files,
it would work in your project, do
whatever it needed to do, and then after
it's done, it would just stop. And the
huge unlock here, which is so exciting
to me, is that this isn't a
deterministic workflow. And so there's
some good there and there's some bad
there. But the good news is that you can
completely control it. And what I mean
by that is, if you've been following
some other cloud code videos I've done
in the past, we build either like a
Python script or a TypeScript. And that
is the actual automation. And that is
deterministic logic code. Meaning that
will always happen step one, step two,
step three. If there's an error, it
can't fix itself. It just errors and
then we get notified. But this isn't
just a Python script. This is Claude
Code agent running the same exact way it
runs when you talk to it. And that's why
this is so exciting because Agentic
workflows are self-healing and they can
read everything in your entire project
and use all your tools. So, as you guys
know, you tell it to go do something and
it starts trying. If it runs into an
error, it doesn't just come back to you
and say, "Eh, I tried." It says, "Okay,
here's the error. Let me try three other
things." And then after I see which one
of those three other things worked best,
I'm going to update myself so that I
never run into that error again. So, now
you are no longer the bottleneck. And
these skills and these workflows can
actually get better and better over time
automatically. But the other important
thing to remember here is if you do want
it to be more deterministic and you want
more control, you can do that because
you could literally have it just execute
a script and that's the whole schedule
task and it just is completely
deterministic that way. So how do you go
ahead and start creating some scheduled
tasks? Well, here you can see one I have
is called morning coffee. So I've showed
this one off before in a few other
videos, but basically every single
morning I would open up my cloud code
and I would say, "Hey, run morning
coffee." Which would help me plan my
day. It would look at my commitments. It
would look at the projects and help me
catch up on what the team is up to. But
now, this can actually just run
automatically at 6:00 a.m. every
morning. And literally all that I did to
set this up was I said, "Take a look at
my morning coffee skill. I would like to
turn this into a scheduled task that
goes off every morning at 6:00 a.m. Help
me get this set up." It read the skill.
It complimented me on the skill. And
then it asked me one question about it.
And then a minute later, my skill that I
run every morning is now automated. And
if you've never used cloud code in the
desktop app, don't worry. It's super
easy. you can basically pull in, you
know, a GitHub repo or a different
folder and you can be working in the
exact same project that you're used to.
So, right here in a new session, I just
asked it, "What skills do you have in
this project?" And it came back and
said, "Hey, here are all the active
skills. We've got content creation.
We've got research and intelligence.
We've got visual diagrams, operations,
and meta." And now any of these skills,
I could just say, "Okay, cool. Turn that
into a weekly automation." All right.
So, there are a few limitations, though.
The first major gotcha is the fact that
your laptop has to be on or your
computer has to be on and the desktop
app has to be open. So if you turn off
your computer, that automation will not
run. Now, the good news is, let's say
you had a task for 7:00 a.m. and you
wake up at 8, you turn on your computer,
Cloud Code would actually check back 7
days and see any scheduled tasks that it
missed and then would catch up and it
would run those. Obviously, that's not
perfect because some of those may be
timesensitive, but it is cool that it
has that ability. Now, what are some
other things to think about? Well, the
first one is that this thing is now
running without your supervision. And
ideally, it's not going to stop to ask
you questions because then what's the
point of having it automated? So, that
means you want to be looking at your
permissions to make sure that it can't
actually go off the rails and do
anything like maybe make a major change
to your GitHub repository or go off and
delete things. And you can take care of
that by changing your local settings in
that project, which you could just say,
"Hey, I want to make sure that you never
delete things. How can I put this in
your settings?" You know, deny a bash
command that does any deletes or
removes. and it will help you figure
that out. I've got a video coming about
this. I will tag that right up here once
that is live on YouTube. These are also
stateless. So basically, every time that
you run one of these, it's going to
throw it in a new session. So right
here, I did a test run of my morning
coffee. Here's the actual task itself.
And then when I open this up, I will be
able to see every run and every run is
going to be fresh and it's not going to
have context of what happened on the
previous run. And the other thing, of
course, is that if you didn't put in an
API key or if there's literally
something that it can't do because it
needs your permission, it's going to
stop. So, what I'd recommend is as soon
as you create a new task, just run it
manually and make sure that it can go
through all of the steps without
oversight. Otherwise, what's going to
happen is it's going to pause and it's
going to ask you for permissions to do
this and permissions to do that. Now,
sometimes it's a good thing that they're
stateless and that they don't have
shared memory, but sometimes you might
want them to, and that would be kind of
part of this whole self-improving thing.
So, here's how I imagine the
self-improving loop working. So, first
of all is fixing the actual script. So
you can have in there the fact that if
it errors, edit your own code and make
sure you're fixed. The second layer is
the prompt. So if you realize that
there's an opportunity to improve this
prompt, rewrite it and now you have a
new prompt. And then the third one is
potentially having a log for memory.
Whether that means every single run, you
put some sort of like status of what
that run did, or maybe you just have a
file that you overwrite so that every
time when the new agent wakes up, it can
look at the log and say, "Hey, this is
what the previous agent just did. Now I
need to run." So, there's lots of ways
that you can kind of tweak these
scheduled tasks to fit your use cases
better. And once again, because they
have the context of everything in that
project, they're going to be super
powerful. They can look at any file that
you want them to. So, that's what my
brain immediately went to, but I wanted
to see what Cloud Code thought. So, I
asked it what it thought the most
optimal strategy was to make these
improve and make sure they have the
right context. So, what it thought of
was a lean strategy where you have one
file per task. So basically every single
time the agent runs it would overwrite
this file with information like here's
the last run, here's how long it lasted,
here's what happened, here's what I did,
here are known issues and things like
that. And this is better than an append
log in some scenarios because like I
said earlier, if you run an automation a
thousand times, then you might have a
thousand append logs. But then what's
cool is the actual structure of your
prompt. So, when you're creating a new
um task right here, the way that you
prompt it, you could basically say,
"Okay, before you actually do your job,
go ahead and read this file," which is
basically the last run, and then you do
your main task, and then after you're
done with the task, overwrite that file
with any current issues or status or
anything that you found that might help
the next agent. So, obviously, I'm going
to be playing around with different
structures of having context shared
between these different, you know,
tasks, but that's just something that I
thought would be really, really cool.
So, another thing I wanted to talk about
is because this is in the desktop app
and because this is running on a
schedule, how do you want to get
notified that that scheduled task has
been done? So, the desktop app does have
notifications, but they're not super
great. At least it wasn't making any
noise and it wasn't capturing my
attention. It's cool that everything
gets organized over here. So, as you
have more tasks, you can see them all
and it's organized. But what you can do
is you can add a hook so that every time
you actually get a sound. So, what I did
is I set up a hook so that every time a
Cloud Code session finishes, I get a
notification. So listen to this.
So that was like kind of the default
Windows little sound. You can change
that, but that's really helpful because
I could be working and I could forget
that a scheduled task might go off and
then I get that noise. But the other
thing I would recommend is in the prompt
of the actual skill itself, maybe just
at the bottom say, "Hey, once this is
done, just shoot me a ClickUp message
and say that this happened." And that's
probably what I'm going to set up for
all my scheduled tasks. And if you're
curious about setting up hooks,
literally just say to Cloud Code, "Set
up a hook. I want you to play a sound
every time you finish talking to me and
it will do it in like a minute. And the
last thing I was curious about is the
fact that we're limited to the desktop
app. Now, Enthropic is shipping like
crazy. So, I'm sure in a week or two
that this is going to be open in the
terminal and in the IDE extensions and
stuff like that, too. But for the
moment, it's only desktop app. And
basically why is because all of the
actual like cron logic and that kind of
metadata lives in the desktop app. even
though the actual files live in your
computer, they live somewhere where
terminal or your VS code cloud code
could actually see it. So I was
interested in that and I said, are you
able to see my scheduled task for
morning coffee? It runs at 609 and
here's where it lives because it lives
kind of in this global folder path right
here. And it can see it, right? Because
it just exists as a file. But what it
can't do is it can't create new
scheduled tasks because it can't
actually touch the cron that the desktop
app of cloud code sets up. But what it
could do is it could edit it. So it
could improve it. It could make changes,
but it can't create them or like run
them. Now, that's actually not a huge
deal to me right now because I usually
work in VS Code, but I can just have the
desktop app open and I can just leave it
open in the background while I've got my
computer on and all of my scheduled
tasks will still be running. And so now
that Cloud Code is so powerful on its
own, it can actually like do things in
the browser as well. I truly think we're
getting to that point where you can
automate anything. So I'm going to go
ahead and stop talking. What you need to
do now is go learn how to set up your
project and create your own executive
assistant to become way more productive
and start to schedule some stuff. Go
ahead and watch this video right up
here. So hopefully I'll see you guys
over there. But that is going to do it
for today. So I appreciate you guys
making it to the end. And if you enjoyed
the video or you learned something new,
please give it a like. Helps me out a
ton. And I'll see you on the next one.
Thanks everyone.