Schedule a message

So far, Louis only speaks when someone speaks to them. A community agent is more useful when they also speak up on their own: a morning summary, a reminder before an event, a weekly look ahead.

These are called scheduled tasks. A scheduled task is a job with a clock attached. When the time comes, Louis wakes up, does the job, and posts the result, with nobody asking.

Louis already has three of them, from the template:

Task	When it runs	What it does
Daily brief	Every day at 7am	Posts what is on today to the group.
Week ahead	Sundays at 6pm	Posts what is coming up in the next week.
Memory clean-up	Sundays at 10am	Checks their notes against your Notion page, and tells the admins about anything that looks wrong.

Louis turned these on the first time you talked. You'll see where they live in NanoClaw's insides.

Waiting until 7am tomorrow is a slow way to learn, so in this step you make one that runs every 5 minutes. In real life you would choose "every morning" or "every Sunday". Every 5 minutes is only so that you can see it happen in class.

Ask Louis to schedule it

In your private chat with the bot, send:

Every 5 minutes, post a Singaporean joke to Angel View with the current time. This is a classroom demo, so I want it more often than usual.

Louis will push back. NanoClaw doesn't let a task run more than 4 times a day unless you insist, and every 5 minutes is 288 times a day. Each run wakes Louis up, and every time they wake up, they use part of your ChatGPT plan. The limit stops a mistake from quietly using it all up.

So they explain the limit and ask if you are sure. Answer Louis clearly:

Yes, I understand that it uses up my ChatGPT plan. Go ahead for the demo. I'll ask you to stop it in a few minutes.

Louis creates the task and tells you when it first runs.

WARNING

Don't forget about this task. Left on, it posts 288 messages a day and uses up your plan. The last section on this page switches it off.

Watch it arrive

Open Angel View in Telegram and wait. Within about 5 minutes, Louis posts a hello with the time, and nobody asked them to. They keep doing it every 5 minutes.

It can be a minute or two late. NanoClaw checks for tasks that are due once a minute, and Louis needs a few seconds to wake up.

See it from the terminal

Louis keeps track of their tasks on your computer, and you can read the list yourself. In your terminal, go to the NanoClaw folder and list them:

cd ~/nanoclaw
pnpm ncl tasks list

ncl is NanoClaw's own command for looking inside it. You see a table with one row per task. The SCHEDULE column shows when each one runs, in a short code, NEXT RUN shows when it runs next, and RUNS counts how many times it has run so far. You should find four rows: your hello, and the three from the template.

The schedule code for your task looks like */5 * * * *. It is called a cron expression, and it means "every 5 minutes". The daily brief's is 0 7 * * *: minute 0 of hour 7, every day.

Switch it off

In your private chat with the bot, send:

Please delete the 5-minute hello task. Leave the other tasks alone.

Louis deletes it and tells you. Check Angel View for 10 minutes: no more hellos.

If they can't, or you want to be sure, stop it from the terminal instead. Run pnpm ncl tasks list again, find your task's name in the SERIES column, and cancel it, putting that name in place of <name>:

pnpm ncl tasks cancel <name>

Don't use cancel --all. It stops the three tasks from the template as well.

What to notice

• You asked in plain words, and Louis wrote the schedule. You never typed */5 * * * *. They turned "every 5 minutes" into the code, then used their own ncl command to create the task.
• The limit is there to protect you. Louis didn't simply do what you asked. They checked first, because the cost lands on you.
• A real schedule is just a different sentence. "Every weekday at 8am, remind the group about anything due that day" is the same step, with a time that won't use up your plan.

Next

You have an agent that lives in a real group, knows who people are, writes what it learns into Notion, sounds like your community, and speaks up on a schedule. Next, step back and see how it all fits together: Concept recap.