Cloud Code is now a twenty four seven AI employee, which means that it is always Cloud Code o'clock, and that might be the nerdiest thing I've ever said. Anthropic has finally done it and launched scheduled tasks natively for Cloud Code, which means every single process, every single skill, everything you've been building and using inside of Claude Code just got 10 times more powerful.
And they literally could not be easier to set up. So in today's video, I'm gonna show you exactly how they work and tell you everything important that you need to know about them. Let's not waste any time and get straight into it. So here I am in Claude Code in the Claude desktop app. Now right now, you do need to be using the desktop app in order to access these scheduled tasks. Now this scheduled task feature came out about a week or two ago in Claude Cowork. As you can see, it's basically the exact same thing. You could create scheduled automations.
But now they finally brought it to Cloud Code, and there's a few ways that you can set them up. The first way is you'd go over here to the schedule tab, and you just click on it, and you can see right here, run tasks on a schedule or whenever you need them, type slash schedule in any existing session to set one up. So those are the two ways. You can either click right here, new task. You can give a name, a description, give it a prompt. You can choose the model you want it to run on. You can choose the mode to run on, and you can also select the folder. And then finally, you just say, hey. I want this to run every hour, every day, every week. At this time, boom. You now have a scheduled automation. So that cron would basically fire off, the session would start up, and then the agent would read the prompt, it would go through your files, it would work in your project, do whatever it needed to do, and then after it's done, it would just stop. And the huge unlock here, which is so exciting to me, is that this isn't a deterministic workflow. And so there's some good there and there's some bad there, but the good news is that you can completely control it. And what I mean by that is if you've been following some other Cloud Code videos I've done in the past, we build either like a Python script or a TypeScript, and that is the actual automation, and that is deterministic
logic code.
Meaning that will always happen step one, step two, step three. If there's an error, it can't fix itself. It just errors and then we get notified. But this isn't just a Python script. This is ClaudeCode agent running the same exact way it runs when you talk to it. And that's why this is so exciting because agentic workflows are self healing, and they can read everything in your entire project and use all your tools. So as you guys know, you tell it to go do something and it starts trying. If it runs into an error, it doesn't just come back and say, I tried. It says, okay. Here's the error. Let me try three other things. And then after I see which one of those three other things work best, I'm gonna update myself so that I never run into that error again. So now you are no longer the bottleneck, and these skills and these workflows can actually get better and better over time automatically.
The other important thing to remember here is if you do want it to be more deterministic and you want more control, you can do that. Because you could literally have it just execute a script and that's the whole scheduled task, and it just is completely deterministic that way. So how do you go ahead and start creating some scheduled tasks? Well, here you can see one I have is called morning coffee. So I've showed this one off before in a few other videos. But, basically, every single morning, I would open up my Cloud Code, and I would say, hey. Run morning coffee, which would help me plan my day. It would look at my commitments. It would look at the projects and help me catch up on what the team is up to. But now this can actually just run automatically at 6AM every morning. And literally all that I did to set this up was I said, take a look at my morning coffee skill. I would like to turn this into a scheduled task that goes off every morning at 6AM.
Help me get this set up. It read the skill. It complimented me on the skill, and then it asked me one question about it. Then And a minute later, my skill that I run every morning is now automated.
And if you've never used Cloud Code in the desktop app, don't worry. It's super easy. You can basically pull in, you know, a GitHub repo or a different folder, and you can be working in the exact same project that you're used to. So right here in the new session, I just asked it, what skills do you have in this project? And it came back and said, hey. Here are all the active skills. We've got content creation. We've got research and intelligence. We've got visual diagrams, operations, and meta. And now any of these skills, I could just say, okay. Cool. Turn that into a weekly automation. Alright. So there are a few limitations though. The first major gotcha is the fact that your laptop has to be on or your computer has to be on, and the desktop app has to be open. So if you turn off your computer, that automation will not run. And the good news is let's say you had a task for 7AM and you wake up at eight, you turn on your computer, Cloud Code would actually check back seven days and see any scheduled task that it missed and then would catch up and it would run those. Obviously, that's not perfect because some of those may be time sensitive, but it is cool that it has that ability. Now what are some other things to think about? Well, the first one is that this thing is now running without your supervision. And ideally, it's not gonna stop to ask you questions because then what's the point of having it automated?
So that means you want to be looking at your permissions to make sure that it can't actually go off the rails and do anything, like maybe make a major change to your GitHub repository or go off and delete things. And you can take care of that by changing your local settings in that project, which you could just say, hey. I wanna make sure that you never delete things. How can I put this in your settings? You know, deny a bash command that does any deletes or removes, and it will help you figure that out. I've got a video coming about this. I will tag that right up here once that is live on YouTube. These are also stateless. So basically, every time that you run one of these, it's going to throw it in in a new session. So right here, I did a test run of my morning coffee. Here's the actual task itself. And then when I open this up, I will be able to see every run. And every run is going to be fresh, and it's not going to have context of what happened on the previous run. And the other thing, of course, is that if you didn't put in an API key or if there's literally something that it can't do because it needs your permission, it's gonna stop. So what I'd recommend is as soon as you create a new task, just run it manually and make sure that it can go through all of the steps without oversight.
Otherwise, what's gonna happen is it's gonna pause and it's gonna ask you for permissions to do this and permissions to do that. Now sometimes it's a good thing that they're stateless and that they don't have shared memory, but sometimes you might want them to. And that would be kind of part of this whole self improving thing. So here's how I imagine the self improving loop working.
So first of all is fixing the actual script. So you can have in there the fact that if it errors, edit your own code and make sure you're fixed. The second layer is the prompt. So if you realize that there's an opportunity to improve this prompt, rewrite it, and now you have a new prompt. And then the third one is potentially having a log for memory. Whether that means every single run, you put some sort of, like, status of what that run did, or maybe you just have a file that you overwrite so that every time when the new agent wakes up, it can look at the log and say, hey. This is what the previous agent just did. Now I need to run. So there's lots of ways that you can kind of tweak these scheduled tasks to fit your use cases better. And once again, because they have the context of everything in that project, they're gonna be super powerful. They can look at any file that you want them to. So that's what my brain immediately went to, but I wanted to see what Claude Co. Thought. So I asked it what it thought the most optimal strategy was to make these improve and make sure they have the right context. So what it thought of was a lean strategy where you have one file per task. So basically, every single time the agent runs, it would overwrite this file with information like, here's the last run, here's how long it lasted, here's what happened, here's what I did, here are known issues, and things like that. And this is better than an append log in some scenarios because like I said earlier,
if you run an automation a thousand times, then you might have a thousand append logs. But then what's cool is the actual structure of your prompt. So when you're creating a new
task right here, the way that you prompt it, you could basically say, okay. Before you actually do your job, go ahead and read this file, which is basically the last run. And then you do your main task, and then after you're done with the task, overwrite that file with any current issues or status or anything that you found that might help the next agent. So obviously, I'm gonna be playing around with different structures of having context shared between these different, you know, tasks, but that's just something that I thought would be really, really cool. So another thing I wanted to talk about is because this is in the desktop app and because this is running on a schedule, how do you want to get notified that that scheduled task has been done? So the desktop app does have notifications, but they're not super great. At least it wasn't making any noise and it wasn't capturing my attention. It's cool that everything gets organized over here, so as you have more tasks, you can see them all and it's organized. But what you can do is you can add a hook so that every time you actually get a sound. So what I did is I set up a hook so that every time a ClaudeCode session finishes, I get a notification. So listen to this.
So that was like kind of the default Windows little sound. You can change that. But But that's really helpful because I could be working and I could forget that a scheduled task might go off and then I get that noise. But the other thing I would recommend is in the prompt of the actual skill itself, maybe just at the bottom say, hey. Once this is done, just shoot me a ClickUp message and say that this happened. And that's probably what I'm gonna set up for all my scheduled tasks. And if you're curious about setting up hooks, literally just say to Cloud Code, set up a hook. I want you to play a sound every time you finish talking to me, and it will do it in, a minute. And the last thing I was curious about is
the fact that we're limited to the desktop app.
Now Anthropic is shipping like crazy, so I'm sure in a week or two that this is gonna be open in the terminal and in the IDE extensions and stuff like that too. But for the moment, it's only desktop app.
And basically why is because all of the actual, like, cron logic and that kind of metadata lives in the desktop app even though the actual files live in your computer. They live somewhere where terminal or your Versus Code, Cloud Code could actually see it. So I was interested in that, and I said, are you able to see my scheduled task for morning coffee? It runs at 06:09, and here's where it lives because it lives kind of in this global folder path right here. And it can see it. Right? Because it just exists as a file. But what it can't do is it can't create
new scheduled tasks because it can't actually touch the cron that the desktop app of Cloud Code sets up. But what it could do is it could edit it. So it could improve it. It could make changes,
but it can't create them or, like, run them. Now that's actually not a huge deal to me right now because I usually work in Versus Code, but I can just have the desktop app open, and I can just leave it open in the background while I've got my computer on, and all of my scheduled tasks will still be running. And so now that Cloud Code is so powerful on its own, it can actually, like, do things in the browser as well. I truly think we're getting to that point where you can automate anything. So I'm gonna go ahead and stop talking. What you need to do now is go learn how to set up your project and create your own executive assistant to become way more productive and start to schedule some stuff. Go ahead and watch this video right up here. So, hopefully, I'll see you guys over there, but that is gonna do it for today. So I appreciate you guys making it to the end. And if you enjoyed the video or you learned something new, please give it a like. It helps me out a ton, and I'll see you on the next one. Thanks, everyone.