Work That Starts Itself
Freddy has three jobs he does every week, by hand, with an agent: check the dependencies, run the full test suite and read the failures, and summarize what changed. He is the schedule. This chapter is how he stops being the schedule, and how a list of things to do turns into threads without him typing the same sentence twice.
The problem
The most useful tasks for an agent are often the most boring ones: recurring, well defined, and easy to forget. They do not need you to think; they need you to remember. And the tasks that do need thinking pile up in a list somewhere else, and starting each one means typing the title into a thread.
The hard way
A calendar reminder that says “run the agent on Friday,”
a shell script in cron that starts a command-line
agent, and a to-do list in a text file that you copy from. The cron
job runs without any of the structure you spent chapters 4 to 9
building: no thread to look at afterwards, no approvals, no
checks, no history of which run did what.
Automations
An automation sends a prompt to an agent on a schedule: nightly
test runs, dependency updates, a weekly summary of open issues.
Open Automations with ⌥⌘A
or the calendar button at the top of the sidebar.
Creating one
An agent can propose one. Ask in a thread, for example “check our dependencies every weekday night”: with the agent gateway on, the agent proposes an automation, and a card in the thread shows its name, schedule and next run, the agent, project and permission mode, and the prompt. Create schedules it as it is, Edit… opens it in the editor first (saving creates it), and Dismiss drops it. Nothing runs unless you accept.
Or by hand: press New and fill in:
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Name | Shown in the list, and as the title of each run's thread |
| Prompt | What the agent should do each time |
| Project | Where it runs |
| Agent | Which provider runs it |
| Permissions | The permission mode for its threads. Nobody may be around to approve, so Accept edits or Full access is usual. |
| Schedule | See below |
| Each run | New thread for every run, or Same thread to continue one conversation |
| If a run fails | Pause the automation, Keep going, or Retry once right away |
| Stop when the reply contains | Optional. When the agent's reply contains this text, the automation switches itself off. Example: ask the agent to reply ALL GREEN when done, and stop on that. |
| Max runs | Optional. Switch off after this many runs. |
The permissions row is the one to think about. Unattended means no one to press Allow, so Ask for approval would stall at the first edit. That is why you want the automation to run in a project where an unattended edit is safe. Review what it did in the thread afterwards, in the Changes tab (chapter 5).
Schedules
| Schedule | Example |
|---|---|
| Daily | every day at 09:00 |
| Weekdays | Monday to Friday at 07:30 |
| Weekly | Fridays at 16:00 |
| Every N minutes | every 30 minutes |
| Once | 2026-12-24 08:00 |
| Cron | 0 9 * * 1-5: standard five fields (minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week; 0 or 7 = Sunday) |
Times are in your Mac's time zone, which is saved with the automation, so daylight-saving changes are handled.
Running and history
- The switch on each row turns an automation on or off. Turning it on schedules the next run from now. Run now runs it immediately without changing the schedule.
- Select an automation to see its prompt, its rules and its run history: when each run started, how long it took, and its result — Succeeded, Failed, Stopped (the stop phrase appeared) or Skipped (the previous run or the thread was still busy).
- Open thread opens the thread where a run happened. If a run waits for an approval, its history entry says so.
Freddy's three jobs become three automations. The dependency check runs on weekdays at 07:30, in a new thread each time, with Accept edits. Because each run is an ordinary thread, the result is waiting in the sidebar like anything else he started.
The task board
The task board (⌥⌘T, or the board button in
the sidebar) is a simple Kanban board with three columns:
Draft, In progress and
Done.
-
Type in Add a task… at the top of
Draft and press
Enter. The task belongs to the project selected in the top-right menu, or the first project when All projects is selected. - Start hands a task to an agent. Workspace creates a thread in the task's project, named after the task, and sends the title and notes as the first message. The card moves to In progress. Dragging a draft card to In progress starts it the same way.
- Once a card has a thread, it shows the thread's state: Working, Needs you, Replied, Failed and so on. Open jumps to the thread. When you mark the thread as done or archive it, the card moves to Done automatically.
- The ⋯ menu on a card: Edit… (title and notes), Move to…, Delete. The menu in the top-right corner filters the board by project.
If your tasks live in Félagi
Elyra Félagi is a project portal with
issues, time tracking and agents. If you use it, Workspace connects:
the task board gets a Félagi tab next to
Local, with the issues assigned to you in the
columns To do, In progress, In review and
Done, each with its identifier (such as ACM-231),
priority, and time spent against its estimate. If you do not use
it, skip this section; nothing else in the course depends on it.
- Connect. In Félagi, make a personal token under Settings → API tokens, with Read and write so work can be reported back. In Workspace, open Settings → Félagi → Connect…, give Félagi's address and the token, and press Connect. The token is kept in the macOS Keychain, not in Workspace's own database.
- Start an issue. Start on a card opens a thread named after the issue and sends the issue's text and acceptance criteria as the first message. The issue moves to In progress and Félagi's timer starts on it. A banner above the message box shows the issue, its status and, while it runs, the timer.
- Report back. Report… on the banner writes back: a comment the thread's agent drafts from the conversation and the uncommitted changes (edit it as you like), a status (suggested as In review), the time to log (from Félagi's timer), and the latest before and after pictures of the page (chapter 10), which you can untick. Send to Félagi logs the hours, posts the comment and sets the status. A read-only token can show issues but not report.
- Today's work in the command palette shows the day at a glance: the Félagi issues you worked on, with the agents' time in their threads against the hours you have logged, and Log for what is left; other threads you worked in; and today's commits by you. Copy summary puts it on the clipboard, ready for a standup.
There is also a way for Workspace to be Félagi's runtime, so that work Félagi gives one of its agents runs as a thread on your Mac, where you can watch it, answer its questions and step in. That is set up under Settings → Félagi → Run Félagi's agents on this Mac, is off by default, and is described in the docs. Know this before you turn it on: what the agent does in those runs, its replies, tool calls and your own messages, is sent to Félagi as it happens.
What you learned
- How an automation is defined, and why its permission mode is the setting to think about
- That automations run while the app is open, and what happens to a run that was due while it was closed
- How to read the run history, and the stop phrase
- How the task board turns a card into a thread, and how the card follows it
- What the Félagi integration adds, and that none of it is needed to use the rest of the course