Schedules

A schedule is a task with a time attached: once on Tuesday at 22:00, every day at 22:00, every Monday at 07:00, or every 90 minutes. When the time comes, Deskfish starts the task exactly as if you had typed it into the chat. The agent is not involved until then; she is free to do other work in the meantime.

Creating one#

Open Scheduled tasks: Deskfish: Scheduled Tasks… in the chat's … menu or the command palette, or the calendar icon in the web page's title bar. It is the same panel inside the chat in both. Its form asks when, what, how much she should decide on her own when it runs, and a budget for its runs (leave it empty for the setting); Add saves it. Times are the local time of the computer Deskfish runs on. Write the task the way you would in the chat, and since nobody may be watching when it runs, be explicit about limits and what you want reported:

The list at the top of the panel shows what is scheduled, with the next time, the fence when it is not the default and the last outcome. Run now starts one (the panel closes so you watch it in the chat); Remove asks once more on the same button. Schedules are kept in a small file in the agent's storage, so they survive reloads, restarts and any number of shutdowns.

What happens at the due time#

• Deskfish is open and the agent is free. A new chat opens with the task, the desktop turns on if it was off, and the task runs like any other. You get a notification when it starts. Results land in the chat, and the run is journaled like every task, so she has last Monday's report in front of her next Monday.
• The agent is busy. The task waits and starts as soon as she finishes, however long that takes. Busy never means skipped.
• Deskfish was not running, or the laptop was asleep. A schedule only fires while Deskfish runs and the machine is awake. Deskfish runs in the background from the first time VS Code starts it until the computer restarts or you stop it, so closing VS Code does not stop a schedule; Deskfish: Keep Running When VS Code Is Closed also brings her back when you log in, so a restart does not either. If the laptop was off or asleep at the due time and Deskfish only sees the moment later, the occurrence is missed: a notice appears in the chat, the log and her journal, and the task waits for its next time. A report meant for 7:00 should not quietly run at lunchtime. The one exception is a short grace, five minutes by default (deskfish.scheduleGraceMinutes), for the case where Deskfish started a moment late.

Shutting the laptop ten times before Monday changes nothing. Only the due moment matters.

The fence on a run nobody is watching#

A task you type is watched: you see each step and can press Stop. A scheduled task is not, so it runs with two limits you do not have to think about:

• It behaves as guided — it asks before anything irreversible and uses no credentials you did not give it — even when deskfish.autonomy is free. Pick Free, like a task you type yourself when the schedule is asked for to lift that for this one schedule.
• It has a cost budget, deskfish.unattendedMaxCostUsd, two dollars by default. At 80% she is told to wrap up; at the budget she takes no more actions and writes a summary. 0 turns it off. The same caveat as deskfish.maxCostUsd applies: the budget can only act where the cost is known (Claude, Kimi or Grok used directly, or an endpoint that reports the charge). A budget typed when the schedule is made is kept on that schedule and wins over the setting.

Both are hers only while nobody asked for the run. Run it now is your click, so it runs with your own settings, like anything you type.

When a scheduled task is interrupted#

If Deskfish stops in the middle of a run — the computer restarts, an update replaces her, the process is killed — she notices at her next start. One line goes in her journal ("Interrupted after 23 steps: … — 41 minutes ago"), and the next task she runs is told what was going on before she does anything: the task, the last ledger, what you said while it ran, the last action that finished, whether the tank restarted, and that she must read the screen before acting. She decides from there whether to carry the old task on. See Running tasks.

Things to know#

• The agent is told in the task that it was scheduled and that nobody is necessarily watching. If a site asks for a code only you have, she knocks on the glass and waits; the task sits paused until you look. Sites that need two-factor codes are poor candidates.
• Anything with consequences on a timer needs a fence of its own too. Put the limits and the "skip if" conditions in the task text: deskfish.unattendedMaxCostUsd limits model spending, not what the agent buys.
• A schedule is created with the command, not by asking in the chat. Telling the agent "do this every Monday" does not register one. Repeats are at least five minutes apart.
• Times are local to the computer Deskfish runs on (which matters only when you open the web page from somewhere in another time zone). A one-off schedule is removed after it fires or is missed.
• Not yet implemented: attaching files to a scheduled task.