A Hacker News post for a project called Claude Code Routines climbed to 686 points — the kind of number that usually means the title hit a nerve, not that everyone read the README. The nerve is familiar. Most developers run the same handful of multi-step tasks over and over: bumping dependencies, drafting release notes, triaging a flaky test, prepping a PR description. An agent that can sort of do each of those still has to be re-explained from scratch every single time. Routines are a bet that the re-explaining is the real cost, and that the fix is packaging the workflow once.
We didn't run a multi-week trial, so treat what follows as a map of the idea and a checklist for evaluating it — not a benchmark. The questions below are the ones we'd want answered before wiring any routine tool into a real repository.
What a "routine" actually is
A routine is a saved, repeatable workflow: a named sequence of steps you hand to the agent so it runs the same way each time instead of improvising from a cold prompt. The unit is the point. A one-line slash command saves keystrokes; a routine saves a decision tree — which files to touch first, what to check before moving on, when to stop and ask you.
