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Routines

A routine is a saved prompt with a schedule behind it, kept per project: a nightly triage, a dependency sweep, a lint gate on the hour. When it comes due, factorai starts a session in that project with the prompt as its first message.

Creating one​

Open a project and switch to its Routines tab, beside Sessions. A routine has a name, a schedule, a prompt, an enable switch and a catch-up window. Schedules come as presets or as a cron expression, and the editor echoes the next few runs so you can see what the expression means before you save it.

What a fire does​

  • It starts an ordinary session: indexed, resumable, searchable, in the sidebar like any other.
  • It does not open a tab, so a project's scheduled work never takes the window away from what you are doing. Its dot is blue while it runs in the background; open it and it becomes an ordinary session with an ordinary tab.
  • Each session a routine started carries the routine's icon in the list, so you can tell what you launched from what a schedule did.

Run now on a routine fires it immediately. It declines, and says why, when the project is already at its concurrency cap.

When factorai is closed​

Routines run only while factorai is open. There is no daemon and no system service. A routine that came due while the app was closed runs at the next launch if its catch-up window still covers it, and otherwise does not run at all. The window is the routine's own setting.

From an agent​

An agent can create and schedule routines through factorai's MCP tools, which is how a session that decides "this should run nightly" makes it so. An agent cannot disable or delete a routine: taking a schedule away stays a human's decision.