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Scheduled tasks let Claude re-run a prompt automatically on an interval. Use them to poll a deployment, babysit a PR, check back on a long-running build, or remind yourself to do something later in the session. To react to events as they happen instead of polling, see Channels: your CI can push the failure into the session directly. To keep the session working turn after turn toward a condition rather than on an interval, see /goal. Tasks are session-scoped: they live in the current conversation and stop when you start a new one. Resuming with --resume or --continue brings back any task that hasn’t expired: a recurring task created within the last 7 days, or a one-shot whose scheduled time hasn’t passed yet. For scheduling that survives independently of any session, use Routines to create a routine on the cloud, set up a Desktop scheduled task, or use GitHub Actions.

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Compare scheduling options

Claude Code offers three ways to schedule recurring or one-off work:
Use cloud tasks for work that should run reliably without your machine. Use Desktop tasks when you need access to local files and tools. Use /loop for quick polling during a session.

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Run a prompt repeatedly with /loop

The /loop bundled skill is the quickest way to run a prompt on repeat while the session stays open. Both the interval and the prompt are optional, and what you provide determines how the loop behaves. You can also pass a skill as the prompt, for example /loop 20m /review-pr 1234, to re-run that skill each iteration. A scheduled fire only runs skills that Claude is allowed to invoke on its own. The following reach Claude as plain text instead of executing:

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Run on a fixed interval

When you supply an interval, Claude converts it to a cron expression, schedules the job, and confirms the cadence and job ID.
The interval can lead the prompt as a bare token like 30m, or trail it as a clause like every 2 hours. Supported units are s for seconds, m for minutes, h for hours, and d for days. Seconds are rounded up to the nearest minute since cron has one-minute granularity. Intervals that don’t map to a clean cron step, such as 7m or 90m, are rounded to the nearest interval that does and Claude tells you what it picked.

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Let Claude choose the interval

When you omit the interval, Claude chooses one dynamically instead of running on a fixed cron schedule. After each iteration it picks a delay between one minute and one hour based on what it observed: short waits while a build is finishing or a PR is active, longer waits when nothing is pending. The chosen delay and the reason for it are printed at the end of each iteration.