How to Schedule Recurring AI Tasks with Cron Jobs

One of the most underrated features of an AI agent is the ability to schedule tasks that run automatically. Not just reminders — actual work. Your PolymathClaw agent can browse the web, compile information, and send you a summary every morning before you wake up.

What cron jobs can do

A cron job is a task that runs on a schedule. Your AI agent supports these out of the box. Some examples:

• Daily news briefing — “Every morning at 8am, check TechCrunch, Hacker News, and The Verge. Send me a summary of the top 5 stories.”
• Weather updates — “Every morning at 7am, check the weather for Denver and tell me if I need an umbrella.”
• Competitor monitoring — “Every Monday at 9am, check competitor.com for new blog posts or product updates.”
• Recurring reminders — “Every Friday at 4pm, remind me to submit my timesheet.”
• Daily standup prep — “Every weekday at 8:30am, check my GitHub notifications and Todoist tasks, then summarize what I need to focus on today.”

How to set one up

Just ask your agent in plain language:

“Every weekday at 8am, check the top stories on Hacker News and send me a 3-sentence summary of each.”

Your agent creates the cron job and confirms it. That’s it. It runs automatically at the scheduled time.

You can also be more specific:

“Set up a cron job: every Monday and Thursday at 9am, search Google News for ‘artificial intelligence regulation’ and summarize the latest developments.”

Managing your cron jobs

Ask your agent to list or remove cron jobs:

• “List all my cron jobs”
• “Delete the weather cron job”
• “Change the news briefing to run at 7am instead of 8am”

Time zones

Your agent uses the timezone set in your dashboard. If you’re in US Mountain Time, “8am” means 8am MDT. You can update your timezone from the dashboard settings at any time.

Combining cron jobs with skills

Cron jobs get more powerful when combined with installed skills:

• Todoist + cron: “Every morning at 8am, read my Todoist tasks for today and send a prioritized list”
• GitHub + cron: “Every weekday at 9am, check for new issues in my-repo and summarize any that are critical”
• Gmail + cron: “Every evening at 6pm, summarize any unread emails from my boss”

Real example: a daily research briefing

Here’s a cron job that actually works well:

“Every weekday at 7:30am, do the following: 1) Check Hacker News for the top 5 stories, 2) Search Google News for ‘AI agents’ and get the 3 most recent articles, 3) Check if there are any new ClawHub skills trending. Compile everything into a short briefing and send it to me.”

Your agent browses the web, gathers the information, and sends the compiled briefing to whatever channel you’re using — Telegram, Discord, Slack, or web chat.

No app to open. No workflow builder to configure. Just tell your agent what you want and when you want it.