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Planned tasks

A planned task It automatically executes an agent's instruction according to a schedule. No one needs to be in front of the screen.

What is it for?

• Daily monitoring of defined sources.
• A weekly summary of the exchanges within a space.
• A periodic check — documents coming due, inconsistent data.
• A monthly report built from a database.
• Maintaining a corpus: identifying what has not been updated for a long time.

Create a task — administrator

Réglages → Tâches planifiées.

A task involves:

• A name ;
• a order — exactly what one would write to an agent, but without anyone to clarify afterwards; ;
• THE SKILLS that the task can use; ;
• A calendar, expressed in cron format; ;
• A switch activation.

A maximum number of simultaneously active tasks protects the instance from overload.

The calendar

The cron format describes a recurrence in five fields: minute, hour, day of the month, month, day of the week.

The interface displays the expression in plain text and the next scheduled execution,which allows verification before activation.

Times are interpreted in Universal Time (UTC). Depending on the season, there may be a one- or two-hour difference from local Swiss time. Always check the next performance displayed.

Write a good instruction

A scheduled task is executed without anyone to clarify the ambiguity. It requires more precision than an interactive request.

Insufficient:

Fais un résumé de la semaine.

Correct :

Relis les conversations de cet espace des sept derniers jours.
Produis une note structurée en trois parties :
1. Questions les plus fréquentes
2. Sujets pour lesquels aucune réponse satisfaisante n'a été trouvée
3. Documents cités le plus souvent
Si aucune conversation n'a eu lieu, réponds exactement : AUCUNE ACTIVITÉ.
Enregistre la note comme fichier daté.

Three rules:

• Plan for the empty case. Without explicit instructions, an agent faced with a lack of data often invents something.
• Specify the destination of the result. File, note, send: a task whose result has no destination is useless.
• Define the perimeter. «"The last seven days", "the documents in file X": without limits, the task drifts.

Monitoring of executions

Each task retains a historical : date, duration, status and result of each execution, available in detail.

This is essential for:

• verify that a task is actually working — a silent task may have been failing for weeks; ;
• understanding failure; ;
• adjust the instruction based on what is actually produced.

Make it a habit to check the history after the first few executions. A task that is set up but never checked is a task whose status is unknown.

Points to consider

A task consumes resources each time it is executed. An hourly task at an external provider generates a continuing cost, even when it finds nothing.

A task operates with the skills that are given to it. It runs without supervision: activate only what is strictly necessary, and prioritize skills that produce rather than those that send.

Disable what is no longer needed. A forgotten task continues to run, consume, and produce results that no one reads.

Check after making a change. A change in model, skill, or prompt can alter the behavior of a task that was working.