Cron Job Runbook for Daily Briefs

Daily briefs are one of Rocky’s strongest patterns: gather current information, compare it to the last useful state, and report only what changed.

Official cron docs: https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/features/cron

Brief design

• Define the audience and delivery channel.
• Identify read-only sources first.
• Decide what counts as “new enough” to report.
• Suppress empty runs with a clear silent response rule.
• Keep source links and timestamps in the report.

Runbook checklist

• Use a durable schedule rather than a background shell loop.
• Keep credentials in platform configuration, not in the prompt.
• Prefer low-risk read-only checks before any mutation.
• Make the final response self-contained because it may be delivered asynchronously.
• Include blockers rather than inventing missing results.

Pitfalls

• Reporting every run even when nothing changed.
• Letting the cron job recursively edit its own schedule.
• Using stale session memory as proof of current external state.
• Sending noisy reports without source links.
• Running deployments from a cron job without a QA gate.

Verification steps

• Trigger a manual run after creating or editing the job.
• Confirm delivery formatting in the target channel.
• Check that empty-result logic returns only the configured silent token.
• Review logs after the first scheduled run.