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Routines write the prompts for you
The old morning ritual
The old morning ritual was coffee, then scanning the feedback channels for gaps worth fixing in spare maker time. Feedback arrives from internal users, emails, partners, and friends who ping on LinkedIn or socials, and everyone posts it all to Slack.
Routines that run overnight
With routines, a prompt runs at a set time each morning: watch the feedback channel, pull out the themes, and look for polish fixes. Agents start without being asked, and by the time the day begins there is a summary and PRs ready to review.
Rising abstraction
The level of abstraction keeps rising. Before, a prompt was written by hand, then several were kicked off asynchronously. Now a routine writes the prompts and spawns the agents. A cron job could always automate a task, but the information still needed a human to decide what to do with it. The next step is more autonomy where verification is strong.
How did cron jobs automate tasks for decades?
Cron is a scheduler that appeared in early Unix in the 1970s and runs commands at set times. Its name comes from chronos, the Greek word for time. A user writes a schedule and a command, and the system runs it without anyone present, which suits backups, reports, and cleanups. Cron can start a task, but a person still has to read the output and decide what to do.
Why does verification limit how autonomous agents can be?
An agent's output is only as useful as the ability to check it. In software, automated tests give a clear pass or fail signal, so an agent can try, check, and retry without a person watching. Tasks without such a signal, like judging tone or strategy, still need human review. This is why coding was among the first areas where agents could run for long stretches.
How do teams collect feedback in chat channels?
Many companies route feedback into a dedicated channel in Slack or a similar chat tool, where employees post what they hear from users, partners, and friends. A shared channel gives the team one place to see patterns instead of scattered emails. The drawback is volume, since a busy channel grows faster than any one person can read. Summaries by theme are a common way to keep up.
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