Agent-Native Cron
An agent's own scheduler for recurring natural-language jobs ("every
morning send me the latest AI news," "every Friday email my boss the
status") — implemented inside the agent runtime, decoupled from
the OS cron. In Hermes: a loop runs a tick()
function every minute, reads the scheduled-job definitions, and executes
whatever is due. Jobs live as plain JSON
(.hermes/cron/jobs.json — each with its prompt and
schedule), and every run writes a markdown record under
cron/output/<job-id>/, so the schedule and the run
history are both inspectable files. Delivery is a system
responsibility, not an agent tool call: results go to the
operator's designated "home" channel (chosen per gateway at setup — e.g.
your Telegram user ID), rather than the agent deciding to invoke a
send-message tool.
Claims
- An agent's scheduler can be its own minute-tick loop rather than the server's cron process. observation — keeps scheduling portable and inside the runtime the agent already owns; the tick+jobs-file shape is conventional cron re-hosted.
- Store job definitions and run outputs as plain files (JSON jobs, markdown run records). best practice — context: personal agents where inspectability beats throughput; the operator can read and edit the schedule and audit every run without tooling.
- Deliver scheduled results via the system to a designated home channel, not via the agent calling a send-message tool. observation — attributed to the source; the notification path is infrastructure, so delivery does not depend on the model choosing to call the right tool.
- The source reports a docs–code discrepancy: Hermes'
documentation says cron jobs are stored in SQLite, but the presenter
found no jobs in his SQLite database and the code reads them from
jobs.json. observation — flagged as the source's inspection finding, check-worthy against the current codebase; an instance of the held "trust the code over the docs" theme.
Related
- Agent Gateway — supplies the home channel that cron results are delivered to.
- Agent Rituals — scheduled routines as recurring scaffolding; cron is the runtime mechanism such rituals can run on.
- Managed Agent — the hosted alternative: vendor-run scheduling instead of a self-hosted tick loop.
- Agent Loop — each due job is one bounded run of the loop, triggered by time instead of a user message.
- Distillate: Hermes Architecture EXPLAINED: Memory, Context & Gateways