Scheduled Tasks
A scheduled task is a prompt Prism sends on a timetable. The morning review of yesterday's run, the weekly sweep for stale cases, the hourly check on a long solve — written once, and sent without you.
SCHEDULED in the threads sidebar opens the page. It lists your tasks with their next run, and New task starts one.
Tasks run only while Prism is open. Prism looks for a due task every 30 seconds, so a run starts within half a minute of its slot. A machine that slept through several slots runs the task once on waking, not once per slot missed.
What a task holds
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Task name | What the list and the notification call it |
| Project | The folder each run's thread is grounded at |
| Prompt | What the agent should do each time. Not a /command |
| Permission mode | What a run may do without asking |
| Model and effort | The model each run uses, picked as in the composer |
| When it runs | The timetable, in your words or as cron |
When it runs
Write the timetable the way you would say it — every weekday at 9am,
every other Thursday at 4pm, daily at 4, 6 and 7pm. A model reads it into a
schedule and the field shows you what it understood, along with the next run, so
a misreading is visible before you save. Write cron instead swaps the field
for a five-field cron expression, and Describe it in words swaps back.
Times are local, and the zone is the one the machine was in when you set the schedule: a task set for 09:00 in Los Angeles still runs at 09:00 Pacific when you open Prism in New York.
Two things cron cannot say work anyway. An interval — every 23 minutes, every
two hours — runs evenly from its start time — now, unless you name one — where a */23 step
would restart its count every hour. And an every-other-week schedule runs in
every second week counted from the week it starts in, rather than on a day of
the month.
What a run may do
Nobody is at the keyboard, so a run cannot be asked anything: whatever would raise an approval card is refused instead. The mode decides what it does not have to ask about.
| Mode | On the picker | A run can |
|---|---|---|
| Accept Edits | Edits and allowlisted commands; refuse the rest | Edit inside the project and run allowlisted commands. The default |
| Manual | Refuse anything that would ask | Only what needs no approval at all |
| Bypass | Approve every tool call | Anything, unless the tool asks regardless of mode |
Even Bypass leaves the tools that ask regardless of mode — cloud file transfers, the solver daemon's lifecycle, plugin installs, scheduled tasks themselves — and a run has nobody to answer those, so they are refused. The modes are the composer's, described for a run nobody is watching — see Permissions & Approvals. Plan is not offered: a scheduled run is there to do the work. A run also cannot create or change scheduled tasks, so a task cannot breed more tasks.
Threads and runs
A run continues the task's own thread, so the task reads as one long conversation rather than twenty separate ones. It starts a fresh thread when the project, model, or effort no longer match the thread it would have continued. Run now starts a run immediately and switches you to its thread.
The Runs list on the task's page keeps the last 20, newest first, each with its time and how it ended. A run that could not start, or could not do what it was asked, says why instead:
| What it says | What happened |
|---|---|
| Skipped: the previous run was still going | The last run had not finished; the slot is given up |
| Project folder not found: path | The folder has moved or is not mounted |
| Model id is no longer offered | The model left the catalog; pick another |
| The task's thread could not be loaded: error | The thread on disk would not open |
| Needed approval: what | The run asked for something it could not be given |
| Thread deleted | The run's thread is gone; nothing to open |
When a run ends, Prism posts a desktop notification with the task's name and the first line of the agent's reply — or the reason it failed, so you can ignore the page and still know.
Pausing and deleting
Pause stops a task firing without losing it; the page says it is paused until you Resume. Resuming does not run the slots it missed — the next slot is the next run. Delete task asks first, then removes it.
Esc closes an open dropdown on the page, and otherwise backs out of a task to the list.
Run now can refuse, and says why on the page: you are signed out, the task belongs to no signed-in account, or its thread is still loading from disk — in which case it runs a moment later. A task whose owner is gone lists as No owner · won't run; delete it and make it again. If Prism cannot read its task file it goes read-only — the error sits at the top of the page and New task and the per-task controls are gone, rather than letting a save overwrite a file Prism could not parse.
Tasks and your account
A task belongs to the account that made it: your user, with the organization you had active. It is listed and runs only while you are signed in with that organization, so nobody else sees it and nobody else is billed for it. Signing out stops tasks from running.
Prism builds on different release channels keep separate task lists, so a stable Prism and a dev build on one machine never both run the same task.
From the agent
You can also just ask. The agent reads your words into a schedule itself and
manages tasks with the prism_schedule_* tools.
| Tool | Use |
|---|---|
prism_schedule_list | Read your tasks. Runs without asking |
prism_schedule_create | Make one |
prism_schedule_update | Change one |
prism_schedule_set_enabled | Pause or resume one |
prism_schedule_delete | Remove one |
Every weekday at 8am, check cases/duct for a finished run and
summarize the residuals.Everything but the read shows an approval card first, so a task is never created, changed or deleted behind your back.