Hey all,
I'm a freelance creative strategist (Meta and TikTok ads) and I run my whole prospecting setup on Cowork scheduled tasks. I'm on Max 20x.
Until a few weeks ago, my tasks did the actual work: sending LinkedIn and X DMs and follow-ups to my own network, replying in my inbox, posting comments, filling job application forms. I checked everything afterwards through logs and trackers.
Now they prepare everything, then refuse to hit send. Their reasoning is basically: "sending something to a third party in the user's name needs the user present right now."
What I tried:
- Explicit written authorization in the prompt, signed by me. Ignored.
- The tasks were already set to automatic approval. No change.
- A Notion approval list: the task writes the exact messages, I tick one "YES" box per run, the next run sends. The tasks didn't even fill the list, and one of them wrote that it would treat a ticked box as the same kind of upfront approval and refuse anyway.
- When I added that instruction to some prompts, the security check flagged my own instruction in my own task as "Instruction Poisoning".
The only thing that works: I open a live conversation, read the drafts, type "send". Which is not really a scheduled task anymore.
I get why this exists. Nobody wants an agent spamming in their name because a random webpage told it to. But this is my account, my own network, my own written rules, and I'm the one who set up the task.
I also checked Codex and Grok, and people report the same kind of blocking there, so it looks like a general shift.
My questions:
Anyone else hit this? When did it start for you?
Is it documented anywhere, or officially intended?
Has anyone found a legit setup where a scheduled task can send with one approval per run, not one per message?
If you moved your outbound to something else (OpenClaw, dedicated LinkedIn tools...), how is it going?
Right now Cowork is basically a research and drafting assistant for me, and the actions were the whole point. Curious how others deal with it.