Routines
The Monday-morning report that writes itself.
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Set up your first schedule
Routines let Claude run recurring workflows without any trigger from you. Set one up with the /schedule command from within a Claude Code session, or in the browser at claude.ai/code/routines:
/schedule "Every Monday at 8am, pull last week's transactions
from QuickBooks, categorize any uncategorized ones using our
categorization rules, and send a summary to Telegram."A routine runs in the cloud against one of your repositories — which is exactly why the distillation pipeline matters: the skills and rules you committed to the repo are what the routine knows. It can be triggered three ways: on a schedule (cron), by an API call to its fire endpoint, or by GitHub events like a PR opening. /schedule "check the vendor portal" in 3 days gives you a one-off run that disables itself after firing.
One distinction to keep straight:
| Mode | How | Where It Runs | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud (Routines) | /schedule or claude.ai/code/routines | Anthropic’s infrastructure | Always runs, even with your laptop closed — but sees your repo and hosted MCP servers, not your local machine |
| Local | Scheduled tasks in the Desktop app, or your own cron firing claude -p | Your machine | Full access to local MCP servers, files, and credentials — but only while the machine is awake |
For Cornwall Market, the Monday report can run in the cloud because QuickBooks is reachable over a hosted MCP connection. A job that needs the invoice PDFs sitting on Sarah’s desktop stays local.
Set up your first routine. Pick something you check every morning — a report, a dashboard, a set of numbers. Use /schedule to automate it.
Cornwall Market's Monday morning routine does this:
1. Pull last week's transactions from QuickBooks (MCP)
2. Categorize any uncategorized ones using the skill
3. Calculate food cost percentage vs previous week
4. Flag any invoices over 30 days overdue
5. Compile everything into a summary
6. Send via Telegram
The team arrives Monday morning to a compiled financial summary. No one opened QuickBooks. No one pulled a report. The system did it while they were sleeping.
Check your understanding
Answer in your own words — write it down before opening the key. Your tutor grades against the criteria and generates fresh variants on retries.
Q1. A cloud routine vs a local scheduled job: give the deciding criterion and one example task for each — and explain why the cloud routine cannot do the local job’s task.
Answer key — attempt every question first
Answer key
Q1
Model answer: Criterion: what the job needs to touch. Cloud routines run on hosted infrastructure — repo contents and hosted/remote MCP; they run even with your laptop closed. Local jobs run on your machine — required when the task needs local files, local MCP servers, or machine credentials. The cloud routine cannot read the invoice PDFs sitting in your desktop Downloads folder.
Pass criteria: criterion = resource locality; correct always-on vs local-access tradeoff; concrete impossibility example
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