Cron in plain English

Build-along · ~12 min at your own keyboard

Scheduled triggers are the 'while you sleep' half of automation: every weekday at 6am, every Friday at 4, first of the month. Modern platforms take the schedule in plain English. Rule stands: schedule the deterministic scripts, not the unattended LLM. This is the engine behind lead-follow-up automation that never forgets a day-3 check-in.

Your starter: Weekly index pull on a schedule

Workflow steps

Make it yours: Set the day and hour your productions actually arrive, list your matter codes, and keep the stop rule: a file that trips the caption or name scan never opens, and no retry is automatic.

SCHEDULE: [weekday] at [hour], for matter codes [list]

1. Pull each index listed. Skip any code with no new volume and say so.
2. Stop on any file whose header row changed since last volume, and on any file where a name, a caption or a docket number appears in a field. The parties stay lettered past this step.
3. For the files that pass, run the review pipeline and write the flags to the matter tab.
4. One-line summary per code: pulled, stopped, flagged, with counts.

Never retry a stopped file. Never open a source outside the list. The stopped file is a question for a person, and anything it cites is not a citation until you have opened it.

The coach checks that what you paste back is your own work. The starter pasted back unchanged won't pass.

Do this

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Share what happened

Paste the schedule, evidence of two untouched automatic runs, and their outputs (trimmed).