Automate Recurring Agent Tasks with Octop Cron Jobs#

Octop lets you schedule your agents to run prompts automatically on a cron schedule — useful for daily summaries, morning briefings, or recurring checks. A cron job fires without any manual input, so your agents can deliver results while you focus on other work.

#How cron jobs work

Every cron job has four parts:

• Name — a display label in the task list. The web UI asks you to fill one in. The API can omit it and derive a label from the prompt.
• Trigger — when the job fires (a cron expression, an interval, or a one-time timestamp)
• Prompt — the message sent to the agent (up to 2,000 characters)
• Task type — Agent has the LLM process the prompt and generate a response; Text pushes the prompt directly as a plain message without LLM involvement

#Create a cron job

#Trigger formats

#Monitor and run jobs

The task list shows each job's schedule, type, prompt, last run time, and last status, so you can confirm a job is firing as expected. Each row carries Enable and Run now actions — Run now triggers the job immediately without waiting for its next scheduled time, which is the quickest way to verify a new job works.