Schedules and background work

An agent normally answers when you write. Three things let it work without you in the channel: a schedule, a delegated task, and a direct message to you.

Schedules

A schedule wakes an agent at a set time with a prompt it wrote for itself, and the agent posts its answer in the channel where the schedule was made. Ask for one in that channel:

Every weekday at 9:00, post a short summary of what changed in the notes channel.

Remind me in 45 minutes to send the invoice.

On Mondays and Thursdays at 17:30, ask me what I got done.

The schedule tools

Tool	What it does
schedule_create	Makes a schedule from a title, a prompt, and one kind of timing.
schedule_list	Lists the channel’s schedules with their next run, or one schedule in full with id. An agent can read another agent’s schedules with agent.
schedule_update	Changes the title, the prompt, or the timing of one schedule. A run may use it to keep its own prompt current.
schedule_cancel	Deletes one schedule.

Owners and admins can create, change, and cancel schedules. Any speaker can list them. An agent can change only its own schedules; to change another’s, ask that agent.

The timing is one of these:

Fields	Runs
in_minutes	Once, that many minutes from now.
at	Once, at YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
time	Every day at HH:MM. Add every_days (1 to 365) for every few days, counted from start_date, or weekdays for chosen days.

Limits

• A channel holds up to 20 schedules, and a prompt is up to 8,000 characters.
• The first run must be within 366 days. A time that has already passed is refused.
• The scheduler checks for due schedules every 30 seconds.
• A run that is found more than 12 hours late, for example after the bot was down, is skipped, not made up.
• A schedule runs with the tier of the person who made it, so someone of a lower tier cannot rewrite it.
• Archiving an agent cancels its schedules.

Time zone

Times are in the timeZone setting of roundtable.config.ts, which is UTC when you set none. The tools tell the agent the zone and the current time, and a refusal for a past time names both. See Configure.

See and cancel them yourself

/roundtable schedule list shows every channel’s schedules. /roundtable schedule cancel cancels one, with an autocomplete list to pick from. Only you can use the command, and the answer is visible only to you.

Delegated work

An agent can hand a long piece of research to a background worker with delegate_task, which takes a title and a self-contained task of up to 4,000 characters.

• The worker has web search and page reading, and nothing else. It sees only the task.
• The agent keeps working with you. When the worker reports back, the report arrives as a new turn in that channel, and the agent answers you with it.
• Where Discord allows it, a thread opens in the channel with the task. It ends with the report, or with the error when the worker fails.
• A channel can have 3 delegated tasks running at once.
• A task that runs for 20 minutes is stopped and reported as failed.
• Running tasks are kept in memory. A restart drops them, and the channel never hears back from them.

The worker uses the model in the delegation setting. Without one it uses the agents’ model, with the thinking level medium. The bot needs Create Public Threads for the thread; see Set up the Discord bot.

Direct messages to you

notify_owner sends you a direct message on Discord. An agent uses it only when you ask to be notified or reminded by direct message, because its normal reply already reaches you in the channel. Only your own turns can use it.

Every Friday at 16:00, check the open tasks and send me the list by direct message.