Lesson 1244 of 1570
Running an AI Agent on a Schedule with a Cron Job
Wire your agent into Vercel Cron or GitHub Actions and it runs every morning without you lifting a finger.
Lesson map
What this lesson covers
Learning path
The main moves in order
- 1The big idea
- 2cron
- 3scheduling
- 4automation
Concept cluster
Terms to connect while reading
Section 1
The big idea
Agents become real automation when they run on a schedule. A daily cron that calls your Claude-powered route is the simplest 'background worker' you'll ever write.
Some examples
- Vercel Cron hits /api/digest every morning at 8am and Claude summarizes yesterday's GitHub activity.
- A GitHub Action runs a triage agent on new issues every hour.
- A serverless function on a 5-minute cron checks for new mentions and drafts replies for review.
- A nightly job calls an agent that updates a status doc with what shipped that day.
Try it!
Add a cron entry in vercel.json pointing at a Claude-powered route. Have it write to a file or send a message daily.
Key terms in this lesson
End-of-lesson quiz
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