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Schedules
A schedule runs something on a recurring cadence, without you needing to be there to ask for it. Point it at a plain question and it becomes a standing prompt that fires itself every morning, every Friday, or on whatever cadence you set; point it at a workflow, and that workflow launches itself on the same kind of cadence instead.
Where to find them
Open Schedules from the main navigation.
Scheduling a task
A task is a prompt on a clock: the same question, sent to an agent, on repeat. At the top of the Schedules screen is a composer box: type what you want asked, in plain language, for example "every morning, summarise yesterday's tickets," and press the arrow. If Stoa recognizes a cadence in what you typed (a time of day, "every weekday," "every Friday," "every hour," and so on) it pre-fills the schedule sheet with it; if it doesn't recognize one, you land on the same sheet with a sensible default and set the time yourself.
The sheet lets you set:
- Name and Prompt. The prompt is exactly what gets sent, word for word, every time the schedule fires.
- Agent. Which one answers; leave it unset and the default agent handles it.
- When it runs. A dropdown of common cadences: every day, every weekday, once a week, or every hour, each with a time (and, for weekly, a day) to set alongside it. If you need something none of those cover, switch it to Custom cron and enter a standard five-field cron expression yourself, evaluated in UTC.
A preview line under the picker spells out what you've set in plain words, and when it will first fire, before you save anything.
Scheduling a workflow
Not every workflow can run unattended: one that needs the requester to confirm a step in person can't fire itself at 3 a.m. with nobody there to click it. A workflow where every step calls a tool, and none require that kind of confirmation, can be scheduled instead. Steps gated behind someone else's approval are fine; they simply park in the approvals queue as usual when the scheduled run reaches them.
From the Workflows catalog, a schedulable workflow's card has a calendar icon. Click it and you'll set a name, answer its launch form once (since nobody's present when it fires to answer it later), and choose a cadence from the same everyday choices as a task, every day, every weekday, once a week, or every hour, with a time. There's no custom cron option here; if you need a cadence that specific, use a task instead.
What happens when a schedule fires
Each firing opens a brand new conversation of its own, rather than adding to one long-running conversation that grows forever. That means every run has its own separate transcript, and a run that ran into trouble carries its own error rather than overwriting the last one.
Managing your schedules
Each schedule shows as a card: its name, its cadence in plain words, what it does (the task's prompt, or which workflow it runs), and when it's next due to fire. From a card you can:
- Toggle it on or off.
- Run it now, firing it immediately without waiting for its cadence.
- Edit it (a task's name, prompt, agent, and cadence).
- Delete it. The schedule goes; conversations from its past runs stay in your chat history.
Click a card to see its history: every past firing, whether it succeeded or failed, and a link into that firing's own conversation.
Use the Active / All filter at the top to hide schedules you've switched off, or see everything.
Paused schedules
A schedule can pause itself, which is different from you switching it off. That happens when something it depends on stops being there, its owner's account or its agent, for instance. A paused schedule says so on its card; hovering shows the reason. A schedule that just has a bad run isn't paused for it: the error is recorded against that one firing, and the next one still comes on schedule.
Getting started
If you don't have many schedules yet, the screen offers a few ready-made ideas, a daily brief, a weekly research digest, a weekday planning prompt, each of which opens the same sheet prefilled so you can adjust it before saving rather than starting from a blank prompt.