This is a cross-post — the original (and any updates) live at broke2builtai.com.
Everything I run, I eventually want to run without me. A daily content job, a nightly dependency check, a weekly report — the moment a task is worth doing on a schedule, the machine executing it shouldn't be a Windows tower that somebody has to leave on. Claude Code's answer is routines: scheduled cloud agents that fire on a cron, do real work in an isolated cloud session, and leave before you wake up. I set my first ones up today; here's the honest walkthrough.
What a routine actually is
A routine is a stored job: a prompt, a GitHub repo, a model, and a schedule. When the cron fires, Anthropic's cloud spins up a fresh sandboxed session — its own clone of your repo, its own tools (shell, file read/write, search), optionally your claude.ai MCP connectors — and hands your prompt to the agent as if you'd typed it. The agent works until the job is done, and the whole session is saved so you can read exactly what it did at claude.ai/code/routines.
Two properties define the shape of everything you build with them:
