Automations
Run a session on a schedule, or queue recurring messages into one you already have.
Some work is worth doing on a timer rather than when you remember it: a nightly dependency check, a Monday-morning triage pass, a recurring prompt against a repository you watch. Automations run that work on your machines without you opening the app.
Automations are experimental. The in-app message when they are off says it plainly: enable them from Settings, then turn on Experiments and Automations. The experiments switch gates the toggle, so you need both.
Find them at Settings → Automations — "Manage scheduled sessions and recurring runs".
Two kinds
A scheduled session starts a new session on a machine you choose, on a schedule. This is the one for work that should happen whether or not you are looking: create it from the new-session flow, where you have already picked the machine, folder, agent and model.
A session automation queues a message into a session that already exists, repeatedly. Add one from the session itself when you want a recurring nudge in a conversation you are keeping around.
Scheduling
A schedule is either an interval — every n minutes — or a cron expression, with presets for the common cases (Every hour, Daily midnight). Cron schedules run against a timezone you set, so a "daily at midnight" automation means midnight where you are rather than wherever the machine thinks it is.
Each automation is Active or Paused. Pausing keeps the definition and stops the runs, which is what you want while you are away.
Running one now
Run now triggers an automation immediately without waiting for its next scheduled time — useful for checking that a new automation does what you meant before you leave it alone.
It queues rather than executing synchronously: the assigned daemon picks it up when it is available. If the machine is asleep, the run waits rather than failing.
From a terminal:
happier automation run <automation-id> [--idempotency-key <key>] [--json]Pass --idempotency-key when the caller might retry — a repeated key will not
run the automation twice.
Related
- Starting a session — where scheduled sessions are created.
- Agent autonomy — agents creating sessions themselves.
- Feature flags — the
automationsgate. - CLI