8 min read
Put an agent on a schedule
Turn a working prompt into a standing task. Describe the cadence the way you would say it out loud, and Helios writes the cron expression for you.
- 01
Start from a prompt that already works
Run the agent manually until the output is what you want. A schedule multiplies whatever the prompt does, so a task that is 80% right becomes 80% right every morning at 7am.
- 02
Add a cron trigger
Open the workflow's triggers and add a schedule. Describe the cadence in plain English — `every weekday at 7am`, `the first of every month`, `every four hours` — and Helios turns it into a cron expression you can inspect and edit directly.
- 03
Set the timezone before you save
Schedules run against the timezone you choose, which matters most for tasks that mean something to a person: a standup digest at 9am is useless if it lands at 9am UTC for a team in California.
- 04
Make the task idempotent
Tell the agent what window it covers — `since your last run`, `the last 24 hours` — and what to skip. Runs that overlap or retry should not send the same email twice, and the prompt is where you say so.
- 05
Let memory carry the thread
Agent memory persists between runs, so a weekly digest can call out what changed since the last one rather than restating the same context every Friday. Say what you want it to remember and it carries that forward.
- 06
Watch the first few scheduled runs
Check the run history after the first two or three fires. Look at what the agent actually did on a quiet day and on a busy one — the interesting failures live at the edges, not in the average case.
Keep going
Next in the track
10 min
Run your first agent
Describe a task in plain English, give the agent a tool to reach for, and watch it work. Ten minutes from an empty workspace to a run you can read end to end.
12 min
React to GitHub events
Start an agent the moment a pull request opens, a build goes red, or a tag lands — filtered down to exactly the events you want it on.
10 min
Connect a database
Give an agent Postgres, MySQL, or ClickHouse. It introspects the schema, writes real SQL, and reasons over the results in its own sandbox.
Templates
Put it to work
Templates that use what this guide covers.
Engineering
Standup without the meeting
Reads yesterday's commits, merges, and review queue, then posts a standup so nobody has to attend one.
Operations
Weekly metrics report
Queries your warehouse, computes the metrics your team argues about, and posts a report with the anomalies called out.
Sales & RevOps
Nightly CRM hygiene
Merges duplicates, fills missing firmographics, and flags deals that have gone quiet — every night, without anyone remembering.
Try it in your workspace.
Start free, connect a tool, and describe the first task in plain English.