Routine Design

Routines are autonomous scheduled tasks owned by individual minions. They execute skill pipelines on a cron schedule without HQ involvement.

Routine structure

{
  "name": "morning-report",
  "pipeline": ["write-daily-report", "send-to-slack"],
  "content": "Write a daily report and post it to the team Slack channel",
  "cron_expression": "0 9 * * 1-5",
  "minion_id": "<uuid>"
}

Field	Type	Description
name	string	Routine name
pipeline	string[]	Ordered list of skill IDs to execute
content	string|null	Description (Markdown)
cron_expression	string|null	Cron schedule
minion_id	string	UUID of the owning minion

Pipeline execution

All skills in a routine pipeline run within a single CLI session. This means context is preserved across steps — the output of one skill is available to the next.

flowchart LR
    A["write-daily-report"] --> B["send-to-slack"] --> C["execution-report"]

The execution-report skill is automatically appended to report results back to the minion API.

Routines vs Workflows

Routines and workflows both execute skill pipelines on a schedule, but they differ in scope and governance.

The core distinction

Think of routines as a personal crontab and workflows as a CI/CD pipeline.

Aspect	Routine	Workflow
Scope	One minion, self-contained	Project-wide, multi-minion coordination
Owner	Individual minion	Project
Role assignment	None — the owning minion runs everything	Per-step roles (PM / Engineer)
Review gates	None	Optional human approval between steps
Versioning	None — always uses latest skill versions	Full version history with immutable snapshots
Execution tracking	Local only (minion-side, last 200 runs)	Full audit trail in HQ database
Trigger	Cron on minion (autonomous)	Cron or on-demand from HQ

When to use which

Use a routine when:

• A single minion can complete the entire task
• No human review is needed between steps
• The task is a personal habit (daily standup prep, end-of-day review, inbox triage)
• You want lightweight, autonomous execution

Use a workflow when:

• Multiple minions need to collaborate (e.g., engineer analyzes, PM reviews)
• Human approval gates are required before certain steps
• You need an audit trail of every execution with step-level tracking
• Reproducibility matters — pinning exact skill versions is important

Example: daily report

The same skills can be used in both routines and workflows depending on the required governance level.

As a routine (one minion, autonomous):

flowchart LR
    subgraph "Routine: morning-report (weekdays 9:00)"
        A["write-daily-report"] --> B["send-to-slack"]
    end

As a workflow (project-coordinated, with review):

flowchart LR
    subgraph "Workflow: team-daily-report"
        A["write-daily-report<br/><i>engineer</i>"] --> B["review-report<br/><i>pm · review required</i>"] --> C["send-to-slack<br/><i>pm</i>"]
    end

Notice that write-daily-report and send-to-slack are the same skills in both cases. The difference is how they are orchestrated, not what they do.

Cron schedules

Standard cron expressions are supported (same syntax as workflows).

Expression	Execution timing
0 9 * * *	Every day at 9:00
0 9 * * 1-5	Weekdays at 9:00
0 18 * * *	Every day at 18:00
0 0 * * 1	Every Monday at 0:00