#Schedules

A schedule starts a new agent for you on a cron cadence: at this time, run this prompt, in this repo, with these agent settings.

JCode also has heartbeats. A heartbeat sends a recurring prompt back into one existing agent so it can reassess and continue the same conversation.

Both concepts use the same cron engine, but their product surfaces stay separate:

• Schedules create a new agent each run. You can inspect, pause, resume, run once, update, or delete them.
• Heartbeats target one existing agent. They are intentionally lightweight: create or delete them over MCP; from the CLI you can also update only their cron period.

Cron is the canonical cadence. The CLI accepts simple presets such as 5m or 1h, but compiles them to cron rather than storing a separate interval type.

#What it's for

• Fresh recurring jobs: start a clean agent for daily triage, reports, or maintenance.
• Heartbeats: have the current agent periodically reassess state and keep moving.
• Build babysitting: keep one agent checking CI, EAS, Docker, or release builds until they pass.
• Daily triage: scan issues, PRs, and failing checks every morning.
• Maintenance sweeps: refresh dependencies, audit docs, or clean stale branches.

#Ways to create one

• In the app — open the Schedules view and create one with agent settings, a cron cadence, a repo, and a prompt. This is the main way to create and manage schedules.
• From chat — ask the agent in a chat and it sets the schedule up for you.
• From the CLI — jcode schedule create, for headless boxes and scripts.
• Over MCP — agents create and manage schedules programmatically.