1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:01,035 Welcome to the show. 2 00:00:01,035 --> 00:00:07,886 James, April 14, 2026: Anthropic drops Claude Code Routines as a research 3 00:00:07,886 --> 00:00:12,596 preview, and the bit that made me sit up was dead simple -- the job runs 4 00:00:12,596 --> 00:00:14,860 on Anthropic-managed cloud infrastructure. 5 00:00:14,860 --> 00:00:16,134 Not on your laptop. 6 00:00:16,134 --> 00:00:19,475 Not on some crusty local daemon you forgot was running. 7 00:00:19,475 --> 00:00:22,431 Your machine can go to sleep, you can shut the lid, 8 00:00:22,431 --> 00:00:25,800 wander off, and the work keeps going.April 14, 9 00:00:25,800 --> 00:00:30,669 2026 is gonna stick for me because that is a REAL line in the sand. 10 00:00:30,669 --> 00:00:34,653 You're saying the old setup literally died if the laptop slept? 11 00:00:34,653 --> 00:00:38,917 Like, Wi-Fi hiccup at 2 a. 12 00:00:34,653 --> 00:00:38,917 m., game over? 13 00:00:34,653 --> 00:00:38,917 Exactly. 14 00:00:38,917 --> 00:00:40,317 That was the brittle bit. 15 00:00:40,317 --> 00:00:43,516 If your machine slept, lost Wi-Fi, 16 00:00:43,516 --> 00:00:48,221 got restarted, battery carked it -- the automation died with it. 17 00:00:48,221 --> 00:00:52,668 Plenty of us have done the grim little ritual of leaving a laptop open 18 00:00:52,668 --> 00:00:56,761 overnight for a dependency audit or a long repo task, 19 00:00:56,761 --> 00:00:59,399 like it's a campfire you can't let go out. 20 00:00:59,399 --> 00:01:04,991 Routines decouple execution from hardware for the first time, 21 00:01:04,991 --> 00:01:10,062 and that changes the whole feel of it.The campfire image is 22 00:01:10,062 --> 00:01:11,594 painfully accurate. 23 00:01:11,594 --> 00:01:14,538 I've absolutely had that move where the screen is dimmed, 24 00:01:14,538 --> 00:01:16,536 charger plugged in, and you're like, 25 00:01:16,536 --> 00:01:21,840 "Nobody touch THIS machine." But okay -- if it lives in Anthropic's cloud 26 00:01:21,840 --> 00:01:23,557 now, the upside is obvious. 27 00:01:23,557 --> 00:01:28,268 The weird part is also obvious: it's running somewhere you can't 28 00:01:23,557 --> 00:01:28,268 see. 29 00:01:28,268 --> 00:01:30,072 Yeah, that's the split emotion. 30 00:01:30,072 --> 00:01:33,909 Relief and a tiny bit of the heebie-jeebies. 31 00:01:33,909 --> 00:01:41,930 The best mental model I've found is: don't think "smarter script." Think 32 00:01:41,930 --> 00:01:47,082 "saved Claude Code job with a home in the cloud." That's different. 33 00:01:47,082 --> 00:01:51,226 A script feels like a thing you launch from your desk. 34 00:01:51,226 --> 00:01:54,498 This feels more like you've built a worker, 35 00:01:54,498 --> 00:02:03,549 parked it somewhere else, and now you're sending it jobs. 36 00:01:54,498 --> 00:02:03,549 Wait -- "saved Claude Code job with a home in the cloud" 37 00:02:03,549 --> 00:02:04,904 is the phrase I'd underline. 38 00:02:04,904 --> 00:02:08,729 Because that means the workflow isn't me babysitting a terminal anymore. 39 00:02:08,729 --> 00:02:11,916 It's me defining a repeatable session that can wake up later, 40 00:02:11,916 --> 00:02:13,480 right? 41 00:02:11,916 --> 00:02:13,480 That's it. 42 00:02:13,480 --> 00:02:16,113 And once you think of it that way, 43 00:02:16,113 --> 00:02:20,424 workflows that used to feel a bit too flaky start sounding realistic. 44 00:02:20,424 --> 00:02:23,295 Not because the model got magic powers overnight, 45 00:02:23,295 --> 00:02:27,784 but because the execution environment stopped being your personal laptop 46 00:02:27,784 --> 00:02:29,912 balanced on the edge of sleep mode. 47 00:02:29,912 --> 00:02:31,902 It's a small shift on paper. 48 00:02:31,902 --> 00:02:36,513 In practice, mate, it's the difference between "maybe I'll try this once" 49 00:02:36,513 --> 00:02:42,516 and "yeah, this can be part of how I work."I like the convenience. 50 00:02:42,516 --> 00:02:46,028 I do NOT automatically trust the convenience. 51 00:02:46,028 --> 00:02:48,186 Because when something moves off your machine, 52 00:02:48,186 --> 00:02:51,059 you also lose a kind of gut-level visibility. 53 00:02:51,059 --> 00:02:53,606 You can't glance at a terminal window and go, 54 00:02:53,606 --> 00:02:55,366 okay, I see what's happening. 55 00:02:55,366 --> 00:02:58,640 So the promise here is freedom from hardware fragility. 56 00:02:58,640 --> 00:03:00,955 The price is, at least a little, 57 00:03:00,955 --> 00:03:05,236 abstraction.And that's the tension for the whole thing, 58 00:03:05,236 --> 00:03:05,712 honestly. 59 00:03:05,712 --> 00:03:09,627 For anyone who's ever nursed an overnight task through dodgy Wi-Fi, 60 00:03:09,627 --> 00:03:10,906 this is a blessing. 61 00:03:10,906 --> 00:03:14,503 For anyone who's careful about where code runs and how, 62 00:03:14,503 --> 00:03:18,413 it's also a signal: stop treating this like a cute local hack. 63 00:03:18,413 --> 00:03:22,393 It's becoming something a bit more serious.Okay, 64 00:03:22,393 --> 00:03:24,458 so if the worker lives in the cloud, 65 00:03:24,458 --> 00:03:27,608 the next question is: how do you wake it up? 66 00:03:27,608 --> 00:03:31,064 There are three paths, and they get progressively more interesting. 67 00:03:31,064 --> 00:03:34,412 The simplest is scheduled triggers -- hourly, 68 00:03:34,412 --> 00:03:35,371 nightly, weekly. 69 00:03:35,371 --> 00:03:41,318 You can create those at claude. 70 00:03:35,371 --> 00:03:41,318 ai/code/routines or just use the /schedule 71 00:03:41,318 --> 00:03:44,040 command in the CLI. 72 00:03:41,318 --> 00:03:44,040 Hourly, nightly, 73 00:03:44,040 --> 00:03:48,030 weekly -- that's already enough for heaps of boring chores. 74 00:03:48,030 --> 00:03:50,426 Like, nightly is the magic one for me. 75 00:03:50,426 --> 00:03:54,020 That's the "check the house while I'm asleep" schedule. 76 00:03:54,020 --> 00:03:57,217 And I like that it's both in the site and the CLI, 77 00:03:57,217 --> 00:04:00,776 because half the battle with tooling is whether you'll actually use it 78 00:04:00,776 --> 00:04:03,600 where you already live. 79 00:04:00,776 --> 00:04:03,600 Right. 80 00:04:03,600 --> 00:04:06,516 Then the programmable one is the API trigger. 81 00:04:06,516 --> 00:04:11,278 Every routine gets its own HTTP endpoint and its own dedicated bearer 82 00:04:11,278 --> 00:04:11,703 token. 83 00:04:11,703 --> 00:04:14,579 You send a POST, it spins up a session, 84 00:04:14,579 --> 00:04:20,269 runs the prompt, and gives you back a session URL that you can open 85 00:04:14,579 --> 00:04:20,269 live.[questioning 86 00:04:20,269 --> 00:04:22,553 tone] That session URL is the bit I'd circle. 87 00:04:22,553 --> 00:04:27,626 So it's not just "fire and forget." You can actually jump into the run 88 00:04:27,626 --> 00:04:32,375 and inspect it? 89 00:04:27,626 --> 00:04:32,375 Yeah -- that's what makes it feel operational instead of 90 00:04:32,375 --> 00:04:33,067 opaque. 91 00:04:33,067 --> 00:04:37,732 And there's another nice detail: the POST body accepts a text field that 92 00:04:37,732 --> 00:04:40,178 gets appended as a one-shot user turn. 93 00:04:40,178 --> 00:04:41,898 That's huge. 94 00:04:41,898 --> 00:04:45,532 Because now the routine isn't locked as some frozen static job. 95 00:04:45,532 --> 00:04:50,473 It's a reusable agent template with just-in-time context.[textually 96 00:04:45,532 --> 00:04:50,473 amused] 97 00:04:50,473 --> 00:04:54,228 "One-shot user turn" sounds very AI-lab, 98 00:04:54,228 --> 00:04:58,381 but the practical version is dead clear: same worker, 99 00:04:58,381 --> 00:05:00,859 new note slipped under the door. 100 00:05:00,859 --> 00:05:10,423 Like, "run the release checks for version 2. 101 00:05:00,859 --> 00:05:10,423 4.1" or "look at THIS incident." 102 00:05:10,423 --> 00:05:15,640 That's much more flexible than a dumb cron script. 103 00:05:10,423 --> 00:05:15,640 Exactly. 104 00:05:15,640 --> 00:05:19,671 Same routine, fresh context per invocation. 105 00:05:19,671 --> 00:05:23,920 Then the third trigger is the one ops people are gonna care about most: 106 00:05:23,920 --> 00:05:24,818 GitHub events. 107 00:05:24,818 --> 00:05:29,638 Pull requests, pushes, releases -- those can wake a routine. 108 00:05:29,638 --> 00:05:34,924 But there is one setup gotcha that matters a LOT: the Claude GitHub App 109 00:05:34,924 --> 00:05:38,423 has to be installed. And this is where people will trip, 110 00:05:38,423 --> 00:05:38,743 yeah? 111 00:05:38,743 --> 00:05:41,458 Because /web-setup sounds like, 112 00:05:41,458 --> 00:05:47,319 "sweet, GitHub is wired up." But that's not enough for webhooks. 113 00:05:41,458 --> 00:05:47,319 Yep. 114 00:05:47,319 --> 00:05:50,831 /web-setup only grants repo cloning access. 115 00:05:50,831 --> 00:05:52,983 It does NOT grant webhook power. 116 00:05:52,983 --> 00:05:57,052 If you want PRs or pushes or releases to trigger the routine, 117 00:05:57,052 --> 00:06:01,773 the GitHub App is the thing that gives you that event plumbing. 118 00:05:57,052 --> 00:06:01,773 That distinction 119 00:06:01,773 --> 00:06:06,736 -- cloning versus webhook power -- is the sort of tiny setup detail that 120 00:06:06,736 --> 00:06:07,710 eats an afternoon. 121 00:06:07,710 --> 00:06:11,709 You think the ute's got fuel, then realize the hose isn't connected. 122 00:06:11,709 --> 00:06:15,065 So, simple schedule if you want regular chores, 123 00:06:15,065 --> 00:06:18,021 API if you want programmable context, 124 00:06:18,021 --> 00:06:21,771 GitHub events if you want it wired into the repo's actual heartbeat.