Cron Jobs

Tell Chief to run something on a schedule. No cron syntax to learn — describe the cadence in plain English.

Setting Up a Cron

Chief, every Monday at 9am Eastern, summarize last week's
#engineering channel and post the summary in #leadership.

Chief confirms the schedule:

Got it. I’ll run Weekly engineering summary every Monday at 09:00 America/New_York. First run: Monday, May 11. Confirm with 👍 or tell me to change it.

After 👍, the cron is live.

Managing Crons

Timezone Handling

Crons are stored with explicit timezone metadata. If you say “every Monday at 9am”, Chief asks for clarification when your tenant has multiple timezones configured. Default is the timezone you set during onboarding.

DST transitions are handled automatically — “every weekday at 8am Pacific” runs at 8am Pacific year-round, regardless of clock changes.

Conditional Crons

Crons can have a precondition — a check that runs first and decides whether to do the work.

Chief, every weekday at 5pm, check if there are any open PRs
without a review. If there are, post the list in #engineering.

If the precondition returns “nothing to do,” Chief stays silent. No notification spam.

Examples

Every Friday at 4pm Pacific, generate the weekly KPI deck and
DM it to me before I sign off.

On the first of every month, pull last month's Stripe revenue
and post the chart in #finance.

Every 30 minutes during business hours, check if our staging
deploy has any new errors in Sentry and ping #engineering
if anything pops up.

Cost Awareness

Each cron run counts toward your monthly token usage. Chief shows estimated monthly cost before activating any cron with cadence < 1/hour. Heavy schedules (per-minute checks) get a warning. You can cap monthly cron spend in Settings → Limits.

Pausing & Deleting

Pause: “Chief, pause that weekly summary” — keeps the schedule, won’t run. Delete: “Chief, delete that cron” — removed entirely. Resume: “Chief, resume the weekly summary”.