Welcome to the show.
James, April 14, 2026: Anthropic drops Claude Code Routines as a research
preview, and the bit that made me sit up was dead simple -- the job runs
on Anthropic-managed cloud infrastructure.
Not on your laptop.
Not on some crusty local daemon you forgot was running.
Your machine can go to sleep, you can shut the lid,
wander off, and the work keeps going.April 14,
2026 is gonna stick for me because that is a REAL line in the sand.
You're saying the old setup literally died if the laptop slept?
Like, Wi-Fi hiccup at 2 a.
m., game over?
Exactly.
That was the brittle bit.
If your machine slept, lost Wi-Fi,
got restarted, battery carked it -- the automation died with it.
Plenty of us have done the grim little ritual of leaving a laptop open
overnight for a dependency audit or a long repo task,
like it's a campfire you can't let go out.
Routines decouple execution from hardware for the first time,
and that changes the whole feel of it.The campfire image is
painfully accurate.
I've absolutely had that move where the screen is dimmed,
charger plugged in, and you're like,
"Nobody touch THIS machine." But okay -- if it lives in Anthropic's cloud
now, the upside is obvious.
The weird part is also obvious: it's running somewhere you can't
see.
Yeah, that's the split emotion.
Relief and a tiny bit of the heebie-jeebies.
The best mental model I've found is: don't think "smarter script." Think
"saved Claude Code job with a home in the cloud." That's different.
A script feels like a thing you launch from your desk.
This feels more like you've built a worker,
parked it somewhere else, and now you're sending it jobs.
Wait -- "saved Claude Code job with a home in the cloud"
is the phrase I'd underline.
Because that means the workflow isn't me babysitting a terminal anymore.
It's me defining a repeatable session that can wake up later,
right?
That's it.
And once you think of it that way,
workflows that used to feel a bit too flaky start sounding realistic.
Not because the model got magic powers overnight,
but because the execution environment stopped being your personal laptop
balanced on the edge of sleep mode.
It's a small shift on paper.
In practice, mate, it's the difference between "maybe I'll try this once"
and "yeah, this can be part of how I work."I like the convenience.
I do NOT automatically trust the convenience.
Because when something moves off your machine,
you also lose a kind of gut-level visibility.
You can't glance at a terminal window and go,
okay, I see what's happening.
So the promise here is freedom from hardware fragility.
The price is, at least a little,
abstraction.And that's the tension for the whole thing,
honestly.
For anyone who's ever nursed an overnight task through dodgy Wi-Fi,
this is a blessing.
For anyone who's careful about where code runs and how,
it's also a signal: stop treating this like a cute local hack.
It's becoming something a bit more serious.Okay,
so if the worker lives in the cloud,
the next question is: how do you wake it up?
There are three paths, and they get progressively more interesting.
The simplest is scheduled triggers -- hourly,
nightly, weekly.
You can create those at claude.
ai/code/routines or just use the /schedule
command in the CLI.
Hourly, nightly,
weekly -- that's already enough for heaps of boring chores.
Like, nightly is the magic one for me.
That's the "check the house while I'm asleep" schedule.
And I like that it's both in the site and the CLI,
because half the battle with tooling is whether you'll actually use it
where you already live.
Right.
Then the programmable one is the API trigger.
Every routine gets its own HTTP endpoint and its own dedicated bearer
token.
You send a POST, it spins up a session,
runs the prompt, and gives you back a session URL that you can open
live.[questioning
tone] That session URL is the bit I'd circle.
So it's not just "fire and forget." You can actually jump into the run
and inspect it?
Yeah -- that's what makes it feel operational instead of
opaque.
And there's another nice detail: the POST body accepts a text field that
gets appended as a one-shot user turn.
That's huge.
Because now the routine isn't locked as some frozen static job.
It's a reusable agent template with just-in-time context.[textually
amused]
"One-shot user turn" sounds very AI-lab,
but the practical version is dead clear: same worker,
new note slipped under the door.
Like, "run the release checks for version 2.
4.1" or "look at THIS incident."
That's much more flexible than a dumb cron script.
Exactly.
Same routine, fresh context per invocation.
Then the third trigger is the one ops people are gonna care about most:
GitHub events.
Pull requests, pushes, releases -- those can wake a routine.
But there is one setup gotcha that matters a LOT: the Claude GitHub App
has to be installed. And this is where people will trip,
yeah?
Because /web-setup sounds like,
"sweet, GitHub is wired up." But that's not enough for webhooks.
Yep.
/web-setup only grants repo cloning access.
It does NOT grant webhook power.
If you want PRs or pushes or releases to trigger the routine,
the GitHub App is the thing that gives you that event plumbing.
That distinction
-- cloning versus webhook power -- is the sort of tiny setup detail that
eats an afternoon.
You think the ute's got fuel, then realize the hose isn't connected.
So, simple schedule if you want regular chores,
API if you want programmable context,
GitHub events if you want it wired into the repo's actual heartbeat.