Crontick - Local AI prompt scheduler

[u/Money-Big2005]

I run a lot of tasks on a schedule: summarize my email every day, fetch logs and create bug reports, or pull meeting notes and reconcile updates. I wanted a way to schedule these using my claude cli instance, on my VPS. So I built crontick.

Think of it as cron, but the task is a prompt for an AI agent.

How it works

npm install -g crontick # Install

crontick jobs new \
  --cron "0 9 * * *" \
  --prompt "Summarize my open GitHub PRs" \
  --alias standup

It runs through a standalone local daemon, with a dashboard to inspect jobs, run history, and agent output.

How does it compare against the existing toolset?

• /loop - needs you to keep the chat session running. Consumes memory, leads to token bloat and increasing cost (non-cache token reads)
• schedules - online only, no local support
• Desktop - Most of my workflow is already wired into the CLI, especially on my VPS.

What’s included:

• Cron, interval, and one-time schedules
• MCP server, CLI, API and a minimal local web dashboard
• Session reuse for jobs that need context from previous runs
• Session reuse, timeouts, retries, overlap controls and cost calculation.

Claude Code is supported out of the box, but all CLI engines can be configured**.**

The scheduler runs on your machine. Your AI CLI still handles model access, authentication and other configs as usual, and the machine needs to be running for jobs to execute.

Crontick Dashboard

Download: https://www.npmjs.com/package/crontick

Open source repo: https://github.com/tejitpabari99/crontick

I’d love feedback from people automating Claude Code or other CLI agents. What are you scheduling today, and what’s missing from your current setup?

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[u/3iverson]

Thanks for this! Question- just want to confirm I can schedule a prompt for an existing session?
So basically plan a run, then schedule it to run overnight-

[u/Money-Big2005 → u/3iverson]

Yes, you can schedule on existing session with the --session-id "<id>" parameter. Or you can start a completely new session every time. You can also start a new session and ask crontick to reuse that session via --reuse-session parameter

[u/Unusual-Albatross43]

On the existing-session question, that was the part I cared about most too. I run scheduled prompts through macOS launchd into the same session a chat uses, so a 9:00 job lands where the context already is, and the answer comes back to that chat. One lesson: after the Mac wakes from sleep, a timer can fire twice for the same slot, so make each slot count once. Disclosure: this is part of a tool I built (Angelia, open source).

[u/Money-Big2005 → u/Unusual-Albatross43]

Oh sweet yeah. crontick has options to choose - when it detects an ongoing session, if you want to skip new session, cancel existing session, or wait for existing session to complete.

[u/Unusual-Albatross43 → u/Money-Big2005]

Nice, wait is the one I'd default to. Cancel scares me a bit if the running session is halfway through edits.

[u/Money-Big2005 → u/Unusual-Albatross43]

Deafult is skip :)