At a glance
- Hermes feature
- Cron jobs, run by the scheduler inside the Hermes gateway
- Where results go
- The bot’s chat, through Hermes’s Bot Chat delivery
- Memory between runs
- On: each run sees its previous output
- Connection
- Bots on your primary connection
- Also visible in
hermes cron list, the web dashboard and Hermes Desktop
Schedule formats
| You type | Hermes runs |
|---|---|
| every 30m | Every 30 minutes |
| 2h | Every two hours; a bare duration repeats |
| in 2h | Once, two hours from now |
| 0 9 * * 1-5 | Weekdays at 9:00, as a cron expression |
| 2026-11-02T09:00:00 | Once, at that date and time |
Presets cover the common cases: Every 30 min, Hourly, Weekdays 9:00, Daily 9:00, Daily 18:00, Mondays 9:00, In 1 hour and Tomorrow 9:00. Hermes also understands phrases such as “every monday 9am”.
Create a schedule
- Open Schedules
From a bot’s chat menu, or from More on the home screen and then pick a bot. The screen says which bot the jobs run as.
- Tap New schedule and name it
For example “Morning briefing”.
- Say what the bot should do
Write the instruction under “What should the bot do?”, as you would in the chat.
- Choose when
Pick a preset under When, or type a schedule from the table above.
- Tap Create schedule
Herald confirms it, and the job appears under Active with the time of its next run.
Managing jobs
Each job shows when it runs next and when it last ran. Its menu offers Run now, which starts it straight away with the result landing in the bot’s chat, Pause or Resume, and Remove, which deletes the schedule but keeps past results in the chat. Paused jobs are grouped separately.
On iPad, the inspector rail has a Schedules card that creates, pauses and resumes the open bot’s jobs and shows the error if the last run or delivery failed. Mission Control lists upcoming jobs across all your bots.
How it works with Hermes
Herald creates jobs through Hermes’s own cron management and asks for results to be delivered to the bot’s Bot Chat with continuity on, so each run sees its last output and can skip what it already reported. A Bot Chat delivery is a real message: the bot reads the output and responds in its chat, which adds one full agent turn to every run.
The jobs are stored by Hermes in ~/.hermes/cron/jobs.json. The gateway checks the schedule every 60 seconds and runs due jobs in fresh sessions, so they work while your phone is off and appear in every other Hermes app.
Limits
- The Hermes gateway must be running. Without it, jobs don’t fire and Bot Chat deliveries fail. See gateway not running.
- Each run is an agent run, and the Bot Chat delivery adds a full turn for the bot on top, so keep frequent jobs cheap.
- Herald sets a name, an instruction and a schedule. To attach skills or pin a model, use the Hermes CLI or dashboard.
- There is no edit button: remove the job and create it again, or edit it on the computer.
- Paused jobs don’t catch up on the runs they missed.
Questions
Do schedules run when my phone is off?
Yes. Jobs run on your Hermes. The phone only creates and manages them, and shows the results.
Why didn’t my job run?
Most often the gateway was stopped or the computer was asleep. Run hermes cron status on the computer: it says whether the scheduler is alive and when the next job is due.
Will I see jobs created elsewhere?
Yes. The Schedules screen lists the bot’s cron jobs from Hermes, including ones made in the terminal, the dashboard or Hermes Desktop.
What happens to runs missed while the computer was off?
When the scheduler is back, a recurring job that missed its slot runs once, however long the gap was. Paused jobs never catch up.
