Scheduling a recipe

What it is

A recipe is a saved multi-step Claude workflow you would otherwise start by hand. Scheduling it means Omniscio starts it for you on a repeating calendar — every couple of hours, every weekday morning, on the first of the month — without you opening the app.

Because a recipe run starts real Claude work, every fire costs money. That is why the form defaults to a sensible, conservative schedule rather than to "as often as possible", and why it is worth reading the controls rather than accepting them.

Where to find it

• From the recipe editor — the Schedule Recipe button in the Recipe Editor opens the Schedule Recipe dialog. On a recipe that already has a schedule, the same button reads Edit Schedule and reopens it.
• The dialog itself — a Frequency row of four buttons, then the controls that frequency needs, a Next run preview underneath, and Cancel / (Schedule or Update) at the foot. A Remove action sits alongside for deleting the schedule, and once a schedule exists the dialog header carries an Active / Paused toggle.

See Use recipes for what a recipe is and how to run one by hand.

How it behaves

Choosing a frequency

Four buttons: Interval, Daily, Weekly, Monthly. The choice changes which controls appear below it.

• Interval — run every so many minutes or hours, with no fixed time of day. You get a row of quick-select buttons — 30m, 1h, 2h, 4h, 8h, 12h — and a Custom box that takes a number of minutes. Custom will not go below 15 minutes. This is the frequency to use for "keep an eye on things", and the reason for the floor is straightforward: at anything faster the run costs more than the thing it is watching.
• Daily — once a day, at a Time you pick.
• Weekly — once a week at a Time you pick, on the days you tick — seven toggles, one per weekday, so "weekdays only" is Mon–Fri ticked and the weekend left off.
• Monthly — once a month at a Time, on the day of the month you pick. The picker offers 1 to 28 only: the last days of the month vary in length, and clamping to 28 means a monthly schedule never silently skips a month because it was pointed at the 31st.

Checking what you set

Below the frequency controls, a Next run line tells you exactly when this will next fire, so a misread frequency shows up before you save rather than after. Schedule creates it; Update saves a change to an existing one.

Afterwards

• The header toggle pauses and resumes the schedule without deleting it — the right move when you want the recipe to stay configured but stop running, rather than losing the setup.
• Remove deletes the schedule. The recipe itself is untouched.
• Because the run is a real Claude session, a scheduled recipe shows up in your inbox like any other run — its approval gates still apply, and a step waiting on your approval still waits for it (see Use recipes for the approval-timeout behaviour).

The defaults a brand-new schedule is seeded with are deliberate, not arbitrary: 5pm local, every 2 hours, weekdays. If you accept them and press Schedule, that is what you get.

Recipe schedules and cron jobs

These are two different mechanisms, and it is easy to reach for the wrong one:

• A recipe schedule lives with the recipe. It is the simplest way to put one recipe on a calendar, and it is what this dialog creates.
• A cron job is the general scheduler — it can run a script, start a session, or run a recipe, and it carries the extra switches a job can have (approval before every run, self-healing, run-if-missed, per-job environment variables, and chaining after another job). Use a cron job when you want those; see Cron jobs.

For agents

• The dialog is src/renderer/src/features/recipes/RecipeScheduleDialog.tsx. Constants worth knowing before reading or writing a schedule: INTERVAL_PRESETS (30m/1h/2h/4h/8h/12h), INTERVAL_MIN_MINUTES = 15, the monthly day picker built from Array.from({ length: 28 }), and the new-schedule seed of 5pm local / every 2 hours / weekdays.
• Pointing a cron job at a recipe instead is the cron-recipe-executor path; the recipe itself is then run by the cron engine, not by this schedule.

Related

• Use recipes — what a recipe is, running one by hand, and the approval gates a scheduled run still goes through.
• Cron jobs — the general scheduler, including running a recipe as a job type.
• Create a cron job with AI — describing a schedule in plain language and letting an AI create it.
• Recipes via CLI — authoring and inspecting recipes from an outside AI.