Routines and schedules

This page shows you the two ways to have By Dawn act later without you. A routine is work an agent does again and again on a timetable, such as a nightly dependency sweep. A follow-up is a single moment on one ticket, such as “check tomorrow at 9 that the email went out”. By the end you’ll be able to set up either and keep an eye on what they did.

Routines

A routine is a playbook for an agent plus a timetable. Each time it comes round, By Dawn creates a ticket from the playbook and an agent works it, so every run leaves a ticket you can open, like any other work. One run is called a tick.

Open Routines at the foot of the sidebar. Routines aren’t tied to the project you’re in: the page lists every routine in your organization. It has two tabs, Fleet Wall and Ledger.

Create a routine

Choose New routine on the Fleet Wall. If you’re inside a project, the routine belongs to it. To start from a ticket you keep doing by hand, open the ticket and choose Actions › Make this recurring: By Dawn fills in the routine from the ticket’s plan or description, its project and its repos.

New routine asks for:

• Name: what you’ll see on the card, such as “Nightly dependency sweep”.
• Cadence: how often it runs (Runs) and in which Timezone. Runs can be Every few minutes (15 or 30), Hourly / every few hours, Daily, On specific days of the week, Monthly (on a day from 1 to 28, so every month has it) or Custom (cron). By Dawn reads the timetable back to you in plain words, so you can check it before you save.
• Target repos: the project’s repos the agent may work in. A routine created outside a project works in none.
• Playbook: what one tick does, written for the agent in Markdown. Say what it should look at, what it should produce and when it should stop.
• Autonomy: how far the agent may go.
  • Observe — reports & files tickets, never edits code
  • Propose — may open draft PRs, never merges
• Caps, optional: Max PRs opened and Max tickets created in one tick. A tick that reaches one stops there.
• If a tick was missed: run one catch-up tick and carry on, or skip it and wait for the next one. By Dawn never runs more than one catch-up, so a routine that was down over a weekend doesn’t open a pile of pull requests on Monday.
• If the last tick is still running: skip the new tick, or queue it until the running one ends.

Choose Create routine. A new routine starts Paused, so nothing runs until you’re ready.

Run, pause and edit

Each routine is a card on the Fleet Wall, with its state (Active or Paused), its autonomy, when it runs next, and a strip of its last ticks coloured by how they went. Above the cards are counts of active and paused routines and of runs this week.

Open a card’s menu for:

• Resume, to start a paused routine, or Pause to stop an active one.
• Run now, to run a tick straight away, whatever the timetable says.
• Edit, to change anything you set when you created it.

A routine whose ticks fail three times in a row pauses itself, so it doesn’t open the same broken pull request every night. The card says why it paused. Fix the playbook, then Resume it.

The Ledger

The Ledger lists every tick, newest first, for All routines or the one you pick. Each row says how the tick went:

Result	Means
Queued	Waiting to start.
Running	In progress.
Clean	Finished, with nothing to do.
Warned	Finished, with warnings.
Capped	Stopped at one of its caps.
Failed	Didn’t finish.
Skipped	Didn’t run, for example because the last tick was still running. The row says why.

Open a row for the details: any error, the model and machine it ran on, and View ticket to open the ticket it worked. By Dawn writes a row even for a tick it skipped, so a routine that has stopped producing work never looks the same as one that had nothing to do.

Follow-ups on a ticket

A follow-up is one thing By Dawn does to a ticket at a time you choose. Open the ticket and choose Actions › Schedule follow-up… (on a phone, it’s in the ticket’s … menu). In Schedule a follow-up:

1. When: choose In 1 hour, Tomorrow 9:00, In 2 days or In 1 week, or pick a date and time. The time is in your own timezone, shown beside it. It can be up to 180 days away.
2. What should happen:
   • Wake the worker: the ticket’s agent gets your message and carries on with it. If no agent is running, one starts.
   • Just remind me: By Dawn only notifies you, with your message.
   • Move the card: By Dawn moves the card to the column you pick, just as if you’d dragged it there. Moving it into a column that starts work starts the agent.
3. Message: what the agent should do, or what you want to be reminded of.

Choose Schedule for …. The follow-up survives restarts and updates, and you’re notified when it fires, whatever it was set to do.

The ticket lists its pending follow-ups under Upcoming, just below the plan, with what each will do, when, and who scheduled it. Cancel removes one. The next one also shows as a countdown in the ticket’s header and on its card.

An agent can schedule a follow-up for itself too, for example to come back in two days and check that a fix held. Those say Scheduled by the worker, and when one fires By Dawn tells the ticket’s assignee, or else whoever last started it.

If a move can’t be made when the time comes, for example because the column was deleted or the ticket is blocked, the follow-up fails and you’re told why. A ticket can hold up to 25 pending follow-ups.

FAQ

Should I use a routine or a follow-up?

Use a routine for work that repeats on a timetable. Use a follow-up for one moment in the life of one ticket, such as checking on a fix after a release.

Can a routine merge its own pull requests?

No. The most a routine can do is open draft pull requests (Propose), and a person reviews them as usual.

My routine is Paused but I never paused it. Why?

New routines start paused, and a routine also pauses itself after three failed ticks in a row. The card says which. Choose Resume from its menu when it’s ready.

What time zone does a follow-up use?

You pick the time in your own timezone, and By Dawn fires it at that moment wherever the agent runs.

Where to go next

• Start a ticket: what happens when a worker starts on a ticket.
• Terminals: step into an agent’s session while it works.