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Schedule tasks on the web

code.claude.com

161–170 of 261 posts

Re: Schedule tasks on the web

#161
post #7

Looks like I'm limited to only 3 cloud scheduled tasks. And I'm on the Max 20x plan, too :( "Your plan gets 3 daily cloud scheduled sessions. Disable or delete an existing schedule to continue." But otherwise, this looks really cool. I've tried using local scheduled tasks in both Claude Code Desktop and the Codex desktop app, and very quickly got annoyed with permissions prompts, so it'll be nice to be able to run sc…

0 7 * * 1-5 ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-... /path/to/claude-cron.sh /path/to/repo >> ~/claude-reports.md 2>&1 Seems trivial.

Sure, now what happens if my laptop is asleep at 7am? Or if our scheduled build took an extra 30 minutes because of contention?

Re: Schedule tasks on the web

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - coding is a verifiable domain You're missing the point though. "1 + 1" vs "one.add(1)" might both be "passable" and correct, but it's missing the forest for the trees, how do you know which one is "long-term the right choice, given what we know?", which is the engineering part of building software, and less about "coding" which tends to be the easy part. How do you evaluate, score and/or benchmark something like…

because it has business context and better reasoning, and can ask humans for clarification and take direction. You don't need to benchmark this, although it's important. We have clear scaling laws on true statistical performance that is monotonically related to any notion of what performance means. I do benchmarks for a living and can attest: benchmarks are bad, but it doesn't matter for the point I'm trying to make.

I feel like you're missing the initial context of this conversation (no pun intended):

> Like for example a trusted user makes feedback -> feedback gets curated into a ticket by an AI agent, then turned into a PR by an Agent, then reviewed by an Agent, before being deployed by an Agent.

Once you add "humans for clarifications and take direction" then yeah, things can be useful, but that's far away from the non-human-involvment-loop earlier described in this thread, which is what people are pushing back against.

Of course, involving people makes things better, that's the entire point here, and that by removing the human, you won't get as good results. Going back to benchmarks, obviously involving humans aren't possible here, so again we're back to being unable to score these processes at all.

Re: Schedule tasks on the web

#163
One interesting restriction is that it won’t do anything with people’s faces.

I run conferences and I like to have photos of delegates on the page so you can see who else is attending.

I wanted to automate this by having Claude go to the person’s LinkedIn profile and save the image to the website.

But it seems it won’t do that because it’s been instructed not to.

Re: Schedule tasks on the web

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You jest, but for some reason the industry stubbornly refuses to solve the "cron job as a service" problem for end-users, whether on the web or in the OS. I feel this is rooted in problems that extend beyond computing. Regular people are not allowed to automate things in their life. Consider that for most people, the only devices designed to allow unattended execution off a timer are a washing machine, some ovens and…

There is nothing to solve. It's already there, a VPS, a container platform, just push your script and schedule it. Of course a provider can offer convenient shortcuts, but at the cost of getting tied into their ecosystem. Anthropic is clearly battling an existential threat: what happens when our paying users figure out they can get a better and cheaper model elsewhere.

> what happens when our paying users figure out they can get a better and cheaper model elsewhere.

They solved that with subscriptions. For end-users (and developers using AI for coding), it makes no sense to go for pay-as-you-go API use, as anything interesting will burn more than the monthly subscription worth of $$$ in API costs in few hours to days.

Re: Schedule tasks on the web

#166
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You jest, but for some reason the industry stubbornly refuses to solve the "cron job as a service" problem for end-users, whether on the web or in the OS. I feel this is rooted in problems that extend beyond computing. Regular people are not allowed to automate things in their life. Consider that for most people, the only devices designed to allow unattended execution off a timer are a washing machine, some ovens and…

> for some reason the industry stubbornly refuses to solve the "cron job as a service" problem for end-users, whether on the web or in the OS. Such a service will always be destroyed by the bell-ends who want to run spam or worse activities.

That doesn't explain lack of such functionality at the OS/platform level. It technically exists on Linux and Windows, but is heavily optimized towards sysadmin use, and essentially hidden from regular users on the "normie UI surface". Most people don't even realize their computers could do things on a timer.

(And on Android, AFAIK there's exactly nothing at all. There's not even common support for any kind of basic automation; only recent exception is Samsung. From third-party apps, there's always been Tasker - very powerful, but the UX almost makes you want to learn to write Android apps instead.)

Re: Schedule tasks on the web

#168
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You jest, but for some reason the industry stubbornly refuses to solve the "cron job as a service" problem for end-users, whether on the web or in the OS. I feel this is rooted in problems that extend beyond computing. Regular people are not allowed to automate things in their life. Consider that for most people, the only devices designed to allow unattended execution off a timer are a washing machine, some ovens and…

What is wrong with things like the Zapier scheduler? (ie https://zapier.com/apps/schedule/integrations ) For running locally, there's also a plethora of cronlikes for every OS under the sun. I think the core problem is not so much that it is not "allowed", but that even the most basic types of automation involves programming. I mean "programming" here in the abstract sense of "methodically breaking up a problem into…

It's not default. People don't need courses for this, they need availability and nudges. None of the platforms people use expose such features to users, much less encourage them to try. On the contrary, they hide or remove it from base UI layer entirely, and the UI choices made clearly suggest platform vendors don't even consider the possibility of regular people being interested.

Computing isn't, and has never been, demand-driven. It's all supply-driven. People choose from what's made available by vendors, and nobody bothers listening to user feedback.

Re: Schedule tasks on the web

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scaling laws vs combinatorial explosion, who wins? In personal experience claude does exceedingly well on mundane code (do a migration, add a field, wire up this UI) and quite poorly on code that has likely never been written (even if it is logically simple for a human). The question is whether this is a quantitative or qualitative barrier. Of course it's still valuable. A real app has plenty of mundane code despite…

Combinatorial explosion? What do you mean? Again, your experiences are true , but they are improving with each release. The error rate on tasks continues to go down, even novel tasks (as far as we can measure them). Again this is where verifiable domains come in -- whatever problems you can specify the model will improve on them, and this improvement will result in better generalization, and improvements on unseen ta…

The space of programs is incomprehensibly massive. Searching for a program that does what you need is a particularly difficult search problem. In the general case you can't solve search, there's no free lunch. Even scaling laws must bow to NFL. But depending on the type of search problem some heuristics can do well. We know human brains have a heuristic that can program (maybe not particularly well, but passably). To evaluate these agents we can only look at it experimentally, there is no sense in which they are mathematically destined to eventually program well.

How good are these types of algorithms at generalization? Are they learning how to code; or are they learning how to code migrations, then learning how to code caches, then learning how to code a command line arg parser, etc?

Verifiable domains are interesting. It is unquestionably why agents have come first for coding. But if you've played with claude you may have experienced it short-circuiting failing tests, cheating tests with code that does not generalize, writing meaningless tests, and at long last if you turn it away from all of these it may say something like "honest answer - this feature is really difficult and we should consider a compromise."

Re: Schedule tasks on the web

#170

I feel like we are just inching closer and closer to a world where rapid iteration of software will be by default. Like for example a trusted user makes feedback -> feedback gets curated into a ticket by an AI agent, then turned into a PR by an Agent, then reviewed by an Agent, before being deployed by an Agent. We are maybe one or two steps from the flywheel being completed. Or maybe we are already there.

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