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Scheduled Deployments

Cron for agents: a schedule fires a fresh session on the clock, and every firing leaves a run record.

Hand-drawn line illustration in warm terracotta and cream: a large cream clock face with two plain hands and no numbers, a row of four evenly spaced cream squares marching beneath it, a loopy line-drawn hand resting beside the clock and a one-line profile face watching.

What it is​

A Scheduled Deployment attaches a cron schedule to an agent. Per the Managed Agents docs (verify against platform.claude.com/docs; beta surfaces drift), the platform fires a session autonomously at each scheduled time, keeps a per-firing run record, and lets you pause, unpause, or archive the schedule. Combined with Agent Once, Session Every Run, the shape is clean: a stable versioned agent, a clock, and a trail of runs.

Why it is a bigger deal than it sounds​

Cron is trivial. Cron for agents is not, because each firing needs everything a session needs: a sandbox, credentials, memory, output collection, and something watching for the run that hangs or fails. Teams that self-host end up building a scheduler, a job queue, and an observability layer around what began as one recurring task. The per-firing run record is the quietly important part: recurring unattended work is exactly where silent failure hides, and a record per firing is the difference between "the report did not arrive" and knowing which run broke and what it did.

Anthropic's own launch-your-agent reference skill treats scheduling as the final step of shipping: it scopes a founder's agent, grades it, and "if it should run on a clock, puts it on a scheduled deployment." Running without you is the definition of done.

The pattern in the field​

The published stories show recurring, clock-driven agent work becoming a product shape of its own:

  • Eve Legal runs nightly agents across a law firm's entire caseload, so, in its CEO's words, "When you wake up, you're approving legal work that has been done overnight." (source)
  • Tasklet's whole product is this shape: users describe recurring business automations and the platform reports "450,000 agent actions executed per day across all customer agents." (source)
  • Brainlabs runs Managed Agents fired from a Notion board as work changes state, the event-driven sibling of the cron trigger. (source)

What to pair it with​

A scheduled agent is unattended by definition, so the surrounding disciplines stop being optional: Memory Stores so runs build on each other, Outcomes so each run has a definition of done, and the Human Gate on any action that commits irreversibly. The overnight-work pattern in the Eve Legal story is the model: the agent works the night shift, the human approves in the morning.

Further Reading​