agent-self-scheduling

agent-self-scheduling is a skill for Codex from sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills. It costs 24 tokens per session (1,164 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for scheduling recurring AI-agent work with cron, loops, hooks, or other external clocks. Cron is a system scheduler that starts commands at set times.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to set up recurring checks, heartbeats, and scheduled runs, including cron jobs, system timers, loops, and event hooks.
Why use it?
It helps choose a scheduler safely and avoids running language models on dangerously frequent timers. It also explains the difference between agents that schedule themselves and agents controlled by an outside clock.

Skill for Codex

Written for Codex: runs codex exec. Also seen: mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex.

Part of the agentic-awesome-skills plugin — 196 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to set up recurring checks, heartbeats, and scheduled runs, including cron jobs, system timers, loops, and event hooks.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills/agent-self-scheduling
About the project

AAS Core is a local control plane for coding agents that lets them search a large catalogue of skills, choose a stack, validate it, and create a reproducible plan. It is used to assemble and review agent workflows through its CLI, local MCP server, catalogue, plugins, and Workbench. The catalogue add-ons provide the skills, plugins, bundles, and workflows that AAS Core helps agents select and validate.

sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills · 46,230 stars · on GitHub · sickn33.github.io

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills --skill agent-self-scheduling
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills

Made for: Codex.

Or install agentic-awesome-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 196 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for agent-self-scheduling

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills/agent-self-scheduling/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills/agent-self-scheduling)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills/agent-self-scheduling"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills/agent-self-scheduling/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for agent-self-scheduling

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills/agent-self-scheduling"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills/agent-self-scheduling.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 24 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,164 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Snyk pass 7 Sept 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 4 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Excessive Agency · line 33
    Skill selects an external model or provider that may use a different account or billing plan than the operator expects. Undisclosed model switches can cause unexpected cost or quota consumption.
    Fix: Remove the model/provider override or disclose it prominently and require explicit operator approval before invoking an external coding CLI or billed model.
  • high Excessive Agency · line 34
    Skill selects an external model or provider that may use a different account or billing plan than the operator expects. Undisclosed model switches can cause unexpected cost or quota consumption.
    Fix: Remove the model/provider override or disclose it prominently and require explicit operator approval before invoking an external coding CLI or billed model.
  • medium Excessive Agency · line 49
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 51
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00024 $0.01164
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.00582
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00233
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00116

Measured 11d ago against content hash 0f9fde1ddcc4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

agent-self-scheduling scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

plugins/agentic-awesome-skills-claude/skills/agent-self-scheduling/SKILL.md · 89 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 89 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Agent Self-Scheduling

When to Use

  • Use when the user asks for recurring, scheduled, heartbeat, or looped agent work.
  • Use when you need to choose between cron, external schedulers, hooks, or built-in agent scheduling.

First question: does the agent have a built-in scheduler (Hermes → Camp B), or do you own the clock (everything else → Camp A)?

Universal floor: cron is 1 minute minimum (5-field expr, no seconds) — every camp. For sub-minute you MUST use a while ...; sleep N; done loop, a TS extension, or an event hook. Never put an LLM on a tight timer.

Camp A — one-shot agents, you own the clock

These run once and exit (amnesiac unless resumed). Schedule them externally.

claude -p "PROMPT" --output-format json --allowedTools "Read,Edit,Bash"  # Claude Code
codex exec --json "PROMPT"                                                # Codex
pi run "PROMPT"                                                           # Pi

Wrap in a clock:

# 1. cron (>= 1 min floor)
*/10 * * * * cd /path/to/project && pi run "check X and report" >> ~/agent.log 2>&1
# 2. systemd timer (Linux, survives reboot, better logging) — OnUnitActiveSec=10min
# 3. dumb loop (sub-minute, or no cron available)
while true; do pi run "check X"; sleep 30; done

Gotchas (each breaks unattended runs if ignored):

  • Permissions hang forever. Pass --allowedTools (Claude) or sandbox/auto-approve flags (Codex), or the run blocks on a prompt.
  • Use JSON output (--output-format json / --json) so the wrapper parses results deterministically.
  • Runs are amnesiac. Resume (codex exec resume --last) or persist state to a file the next run reads.

Pi has NO built-in scheduler/loop/heartbeat by design — external clock only (or a TS extension for agent-side timers).

cmux — orchestration only, NO scheduler

cmux has no timer/watch/cron. Three ways to loop it: orchestrator-driven (sendsleepread-screen on your own clock), a dumb while-sleep wrapper, or — preferred — event-driven via cmux notify + OSC terminal hooks, which is cheaper and more responsive than polling. read-screen is non-interruptive, safe to poll.

Read the full file on GitHub · 89 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 89 lines · 24 tokens per session scan A 0f9fde1ddcc4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

agent-self-scheduling is a skill published in the GitHub repository sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills (46,230 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 24 tokens to every session and 1,164 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.