Coding agents shouldn't wait for you to press enter. This is a walkthrough of Routines — the Claude Code feature that turns prompts into proactive agents that notice, decide, and act on their own.
Today, Claude Code is a powerful tool: it waits for your prompt and your keystroke. The whole pitch of Routines is closing that gap — letting Claude initiate the work itself when something happens or some time passes.
Running Claude Code on a cron is doable — but everyone who tried it ended up maintaining a pile of plumbing instead of writing prompts. Three problems showed up every time. Hover each one.
Not your laptop — close it and the session dies. So you're suddenly on the hook for hosting, data persistence, and authentication.
You build on cron, or spin up endpoints to post to. Either way it's boilerplate you own and babysit forever.
A headless session is a black box. No way to watch, steer, bound, or resume what the agent is up to in real time.
A routine is an automation where you kick off a remote Claude Code session by defining only four things — and Claude Code handles all the rest.
Underneath, it's still just a Claude Code session — the same one you'd launch in your terminal — but always available, proactive, and fully steerable from web, CLI, or desktop.
Whatever you're automating, the design always reduces to the same three questions. Click through them.
There are two flavors. A schedule runs on a cadence — like a weekly diff of source code against the docs repo. An event reacts to something happening — a release cut, a PR labeled needs-docs, or an issue opened.
This is the ceiling on how good the output can be — whatever context Claude has is the most it can work with. Give it the repos it must read and write, plus connectors for reference material and notifications.
Three levers. Set up agent-on-agent review (a generator routine creates a PR, a critic routine reviews it). Stay human-in-the-loop by opening the live session to nudge it mid-run. And always verify the output — render the page, confirm it's what you expected.
Claude Code's pull requests jumped — great for everyone except the one engineer keeping the docs in sync. She became an early Routines adopter. Here's the schedule-based routine she built.
Pick a trigger, the context Claude gets, and how you'll steer it. Watch the recipe assemble on the right — this is exactly the three-decision model in action.
Common engineering chores, recast through the three-decision lens. Notice each one is just trigger + context + steering.