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0003 — No background automations or schedulers by default

  • Status: Accepted
  • Date: 2026-05-06
  • Deciders: maintainers

Context

Many "agent" tutorials default to running models on a schedule — cron, launchd, GitHub Actions cron, Windows Task Scheduler, hosted "always-on" agents. In practice this:

  • runs up real costs silently,
  • runs unreviewed tool calls against the user's accounts,
  • and creates a long tail of dormant credentials and orphaned processes.

Decision

This guide:

  • documents schedulers as manual-only examples that the reader has to deliberately enable,
  • never includes a working scheduled job in any starter template,
  • and explicitly warns when an example, if scheduled, would touch external services.

Consequences

  • Pros
  • Lower blast radius when readers copy/paste examples.
  • Aligns with the safety baseline (HITL by default).
  • Easier to teach evals and red-teaming before automation.
  • Cons
  • Some legitimate use cases (recurring digests, monitoring) need extra effort to wire up.
  • This guide is not a how-to for "always-on" agents. Other guides cover that.

Alternatives considered

  • Provide cron examples by default with strong warnings — warnings get ignored. Defaults matter more than disclaimers.
  • Provide a hosted scheduler — out of scope; this is a documentation site.