# Routines and skills

A routine is a task an agent runs on its own: on a schedule, or when something happens. Because each agent works on its own cloud computer, routines keep running while your Mac is closed.

## Set up a routine

Ask the agent in plain words:

> Every weekday at 8am, sort my inbox and send me a short summary of what needs me.

The agent creates the routine and confirms when it will run. You can also make one yourself: open the agent, choose **Routines**, then **New Routine**, and give it a name, an instruction and when to run.

Each routine has **Active** to turn it on or off, **Test run** to try it now, and **Run history** to see what it did. **Delete** removes it.

## Run on an event

A routine can also start when something happens in another app, such as:

- a mention in **Slack**,
- a new pull request or a failed check in **GitHub**,
- a new issue in **Linear**,
- an error in **Sentry**,
- an incident in **PagerDuty**.

> When someone mentions me in the #support channel, draft a reply and show it to me.

## Skills

A skill is a way of doing something that an agent can reuse, like your report format or your steps for onboarding a client. Teach an agent once and ask it to save the process as a skill. You can keep a skill to yourself or share it with your team, and it's added to every agent it's shared with.

## Good routines

- **Start with a task that already worked once** in the chat, then make it a routine.
- **Say what to do with the result:** send it to you, post it in Slack, or file it in Google Drive.
- **Keep approvals on** for anything that sends, pays or posts. A routine still asks first.