Scheduled Tasks

Kimaki can run a prompt on a schedule: once at a future time, or repeatedly on a cron expression. This turns the bot into an autonomous worker that wakes up, does a job, and posts the result as a Discord thread you can reply to.

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Scheduling with `--send-at`

Add --send-at to any kimaki send command. It accepts a one-time UTC ISO timestamp (ending in Z) or a cron expression:

12345678# One-time: run at a specific UTC time
kimaki send --channel <channel-id> --prompt 'Review open PRs' \
  --send-at '2026-03-01T09:00:00Z'

# Recurring: every Monday at 9am UTC
kimaki send --channel <channel-id> \
  --prompt 'Run the test suite and summarize failures' \
  --send-at '0 9 * * 1'

All scheduling is in UTC. One-time dates must end with Z, and cron expressions fire in UTC too. Convert from your local time before scheduling.

Flagship example: a morning email digest

The pattern that makes scheduled tasks shine: a morning email digest you can act on from Discord.

  cron 0 7 * * *
       │
       ▼
  ┌─────────┐      ┌──────────┐      ┌───────────┐
  │ read    │ ───▶ │ post     │ ───▶ │ you reply │
  │ inbox   │      │ digest   │      │ (mark)    │
  └─────────┘      └──────────┘      └───────────┘

Schedule a task that reads your inbox each morning with a CLI like Zele (a multi-account email and calendar CLI) and posts a summary:

123kimaki send --channel <channel-id> \
  --prompt 'Use the zele CLI to read my unread emails. Post a concise digest grouped by sender and importance. List the message IDs so I can act on them.' \
  --send-at '0 7 * * *'

When the digest lands as a thread, reply to it to resume the work: "mark the GitHub ones as read and unsubscribe from the newsletters." The agent runs the corresponding zele commands. The whole loop, read then act, happens from one Discord thread.

Notify-only reminders

For a reminder that should not start an AI session, add --notify-only. It posts a thread you can reply to later:

123kimaki send --session <session-id> \
  --prompt 'Reminder: <@user-id> the staging API key created today expires 2026-06-01. Renew it before it breaks prod.' \
  --send-at '2026-05-28T09:00:00Z' --notify-only

Make reminder prompts detailed: the future reader has no context, so include what, when, why, and the exact action needed.

Other recurring patterns

Weekly QA — run the full test suite, summarize failures, mention a user only if review is needed.
Maintenance cron — rotate secrets, check dependency updates, clean stale branches on a 0 9 1 * * monthly schedule.
Project memory — have the task read and update a markdown file in the repo each run.

All other send flags (--notify-only, --worktree, --agent, --model, --user) work with --send-at. The exception is --wait, which is incompatible since the task runs in the future.

Managing tasks

123kimaki task list
kimaki task edit <id> --prompt "new prompt" [--send-at "new schedule"]
kimaki task delete <id>