Discussion

Automate work with routines

netdur: didn’t we have several antitrust cases where a vendor used its monopoly to disadvantage rivals? did not anthropic block openclaw?

airstrike: [delayed]

ctoth: You'd think that if they were compute-limited ... Trying to get people to use it less ... The rational thing to do would be to not ship features that will use more compute automatedly? Or does this use extra usage?

whicks: I would imagine that this sort of scheduling allows them to have more predictable loads, and they may be hoping that people will schedule some of their tasks in “off hours” to reduce daytime load.

ctoth: I thought about that but I'm pretty sure that if the backlog is automatically clean and I don't need to run my skill for that when I start up in the morning that just means I can do the next task I would have done which will probably use Claude Code.Your own, personal, Jevons.

ale: So MCP servers all over again? I mean at the end of the day this is yet another way of injecting data into a prompt that’s fed to a model and returned back to you.

bpodgursky: OpenClawd had about a two week moat...Feature delivery rate by Anthropic is basically a fast takeoff in miniature. Pushing out multiple features each week that used to take enterprises quarters to deliver.

whalesalad: Hard to wanna go all-in on the Anthropic ecosystem with how inconsistent model output from their top-tier has been recently. I pay $$$ for api-level opus 4.6 to avoid any low-tier binning or throttling or subversive "its peak rn so we're gonna serve up sonnet in place of opus for the next few hours" but I still find that the quality has been really hit or miss lately.The bell curve up and then back down has been so jarring that I am pivoting to fully diversifying my use of all models to ensure that no one org has me by the horns.

bpodgursky: yeah i mean nobody uses Claude anymore, the utilization is too high

vessenes: This is one of the best features of OpenClaw - makes sense to swipe it into Claude Code directly. I wonder if Anthropic wants to just make claude a full stand-in replacement for openclaw, or just chip away at what they think the best features are, now that oAI has acquired.

watermelon0: Seems like it only supports x86_64. It would be nice if they offered a way to bring your own compute, to be able to work on projects targeting arm64.

andai: I'm a little confused on the ToS here. From what I gathered, running `claude -p <prompt>` on cron is fine, but putting it in my Telegram bot is a ToS violation (unless I use per-token billing) because it's a 3rd party harness, right? (`claude -p` being a trivial workaround for the "no 3rd party stuff on the subscription" rule)This Routines feature notably works with the subscription, and it also has API callbacks. So if my Telegram bot calls that API... do I get my Anthropic account nuked or not?

iBelieve: Max accounts get 15 daily runs included, any runs above that will get billed as extra usage.

mkw5053: What are some of the best use cases you've found? I have some gh actions set up to call claude code, but those have already been possible.

nico: Nice, could this enable n8n-style workflows that run fully automatically then?

unshavedyak: Wait we can't use claude -p around other tools? What is the point of the JSON SDK then? Anthropic is confusing here, ugh.edit: And specifically i'm making an IDE, and trying to get ClaudeCode into it. I frankly have no clue when Claude usage is simply part of an IDE and "okay" and when it becomes a third party harness..

grafmax: They’re shooting themselves in the foot with these dumb restrictions.

taytus: They are not dumb restrictions. They just don't have the compute. That is the dumb part. Dario did not secure the compute they need so now they are obviously struggling.

slopinthebag: You're delusional if you think these features would take competent programmers quarters to deliver.

buster: He said "enterprises" not "competent programmers".

summarity: If you’re trying this for automating things on GitHub, also take a look at Agentic Workflows: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.github.com&#x2F;gh-aw&#x2F;They support much of the same triggers and come with many additional security controls out of the box

gavinray: Why have I not heard of this? Was looking for a way to integrate LLM CLI's to do automated feature development + PR submission triggered by Github issues, seems like this would solve it.

theodorewiles: How does this deal with stop hooks? Can it run https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;anthropics&#x2F;claude-code&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;plugins&#x2F;...

hmokiguess: Wouldn't ACP be better for an IDE? https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agentclientprotocol.com&#x2F;get-started&#x2F;introduction

unshavedyak: Possibly, though at first i was entirely focusing (and still am) on Claude Code usage. Given that CC had an API, i figured its own SDK would update faster&#x2F;better&#x2F;etc to new Claude features that Anthropic introduces. I'm sure ACP is a flexible protocol, but nonetheless i was just aiming for direct Claude integration.. and you know, it's an official SDK, seemed quite logical to me.It would be absurd to me if the same application is somehow allowed via ACP but not via official SDK. Though perhaps the official SDK offers data&#x2F;features that they don't want you to use for certain scenarios? If that were they case though it would be nice if they actually published a per-SDK-API restrictions list.That we're having to guess at this feels painful.edit: Hah, hilariously you're still using the SDK even if you use ACP, since Claude doesn't have ACP support i believe?

Eldodi: Anthropic is really good at releasing features that are almost the same but not exactly the same as other features they released the week before

dymk: 7 days is long enough for work to leave the context window, hence…

joshstrange: LLMs and LLM providers are massive black boxes. I get a lot of value from them and so I can put up with that to a certain extent, but these new "products"&#x2F;features that Anthropic are shipping are very unappealing to me. Not because I can't see a use-case for them, but because I have 0 trust in them:- No trust that they won't nerf the tool&#x2F;model behind the feature- No trust they won't sunset the feature (the graveyard of LLM-features is vast and growing quickly while they throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks)- No trust in the company long-term. Both in them being around at all and them not rug-pulling. I don't want to build on their "platform". I'll use their harness and their models but I don't want more lock-in than that.If Anthropic goes "bad" I want to pick up and move to another harness and&#x2F;or model with minimal fuss. Buying in to things like this would make that much harder.I'm not going to build my business or my development flows on things I can't replicate myself. Also, I imagine debugging any of this would be maddening. The value add is just not there IMHO.EDIT: Put another way, LLM companies are trying to climb the ladder to be a platform, I have zero interest in that, I was a "dumb pipe", I want a commodity, I want a provider, not a platform. Claude Code is as far into the dragon's lair that I want to venture and I'm only okay with that because I know I can jump to OpenCode&#x2F;Codex&#x2F;etc if&#x2F;when Anthropic "goes bad".

chinathrow: Yeah so better to convert tokens into sw doing the job at close to zero costs running on own systems.

spelunker: > In the Desktop app, click New task and choose New remote task; choosing New local task instead creates a local Desktop scheduled task, which runs on your machine and is not a routine.Oh uh... ok then.

taw1285: I have a small team of 4 engineers, each of us is on the personal max subscription plan and prefer to stay this way to save cost. Does anyone know how I can overcome the challenge with setting up Routines or Scheduled Tasks with Anthropic infra in a collaborate manner: ie: all teammates can contribute to these nightly job of cleaning up the docs, cleaning up vibe coding slops.

joshstrange: The restrictions are dumb not because they're lower than any of us want them to be, but because they're unclear. Every time Claude comes up on Hacker News, someone asks this question. And every time people chime in to agree that they also are unclear or someone weighs in saying, no, it's totally clear, while proceeding not to point at any official resource and&#x2F;or to "explain" the rules in a that is incompatible with official documentation.Example: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47737924

taytus: You are arguing something different. My point is that they must apply these restrictions. Do I think they could have calculated their growth a little better? Yes, of course, but hindsight is 20&#x2F;20.

palata: > - No trust that they won't nerf the tool&#x2F;model behind the featureI actually trust that they will.

dgellow: Their growth over the past months has been more than insane. It’s completely expected they don’t have the compute. You don’t have infinite data centers around

taytus: Like or not, openai isn't having the same compute strain, meaning this was predictable.

dispencer: This wild, one of the pieces I was lacking for a very openclaw-esque future. Now I think I have all the mcp tools I need (github, linear, slack, gmail, querybear), all the skills I need, and now can run these on a loop.Am I needed anymore?

brcmthrowaway: No

cush: You could so easily build your own &#x2F;schedule. This is hardly a feature driving lock-in

hallway_monitor: My team was doing this until recently but I think in February, Anthropic made team accounts available for subscription instead of API billing. Assuming that is the cost you mentioned.

comboy: Unrelated, but Claude was performing so tragically last few days, maybe week(s), but days mostly, that I had to reluctantly switch. Reluctantly because I enjoy it. Even the most basic stuff, like most python scripts it has to rerun because of some syntax error.The new reality of coding took away one of the best things for me - that the computer always just does what it is told to do. If the results are wrong it means I'm wrong, I made a bug and I can debug it. Here.. I'm not a hater, it's a powerful tool, but.. it's different.

mikepurvis: > I want to pick up and move to another harness and&#x2F;or model with minimal fuss. Buying in to things like this would make that much harder.Yes, I expect that is very much the point here. A bunch of product guys got on a whiteboard and said, okay the thing is in wide use but the main moat is that our competitors are even more distrusted in the market than we are; other than that it's completely undifferentiated and can be swapped out in a heartbeat for multiple other offerings. How do we do we persuade our investors we have a locked in customer base that won't just up-stakes in favour of other options or just running open source models themselves?

joshstrange: Anthropic deserves to have this as the top comment on every HN post. It's absurd that they don't clarify this better and so many people are running around online saying the exact opposite from what their, confusing, docs say.The Chilling Effect of this is real and it gets more and more frustrating that they can't or won't clarify.

throwup238: It’s also absurd that they’re doing their communication on a bunch of separate platforms like HN, Reddit, and Github with no coherent strategy or consistency as far as I can tell. Can’t I just get policy clarifications in my email like a normal business?I downgraded my $200&#x2F;mo sub to $20 this past week and I’m going to try out Codex’s Pro plans. Between the cache TTL (does it even affect me? No idea), changes in the rate limit, 429 rate limit HTTP status code during business hours, adaptive thinking (literally the worst decision they’ve ever made, as far as my line of work is concerned), dumb agent behavior silently creating batshit insane fallthroughs, clearly vibe coded harness&#x2F;infrastructure, and their total lack of transparency, I think I’m done. It was fun while it lasted but I’m tired of paying for their mistakes in capacity planning and I feel like the big rug pull (from all three SOTA providers) is coming like a freight train.

sidrag22: I was "Claude only" for well over a year. Kinda crazy how they seem to be gaining a LOT of public attention the last few months, yet i see this type of sentiment from other devs&#x2F;myself. for me it started with their opencode drama, and openai's decision to embrace opencode in response.I didn't even know what opencode was prior to that drama, yet now here i am using opencode and a ton of crafted openai agents in my projects. Would love to have some claude agents in that mix, but i guess im stuck in Claude Code if i wanna even touch their models... I'd love to go back to just claude as i "trust" them more in a sorta less evil vibe manner, but if they are gonna prevent subscription usage to something people use to allow themselves more freedom, they gotta then close that gap with their own tools rather than pumping out stuff like this which scares me off given the past couple months.I totally understand why they are cutting off 3pa access to stuff like openclaw, where the avg user is just a power user in comparison to avg claude user or whatever. I haven't kept up a ton with their opencode issues, but I just know i can't get behind a company actively trying to make my potential usage of tokens less optimized to keep me locked into their ecosystem.Really just kinda hoping local models kill it all for devs after a few years, I'm not interested in perma relying on data centers for my workflow.

deadfall23: Why not https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;anthropics&#x2F;claude-code-action?

minimaxir: Given the alleged recent extreme reduction in Claude Code usage limits (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47739260), how do these more autonomous tools work within that constraint? Are they effectively only usable with a 20x Max plan?EDIT: This comment is apparently [dead] and idk why.

giancarlostoro: I've been talking to friends about this extensively, and read all sorts of different social media posts on X where people deep dove things (I'm at work so I don't have any links handy - though I did submit one on HN, grain of salt, unsure how valid it is but it was interesting: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47752049 ).I think the real issue stems from the 1 Million token context window change. They did not anticipate the amount of load it would give you. That first few days after they released the new token window, I was making amazing things in one single session from nothing, to something (a new .NET based programming language inspired by Python, and a Virtual Actor framework in Rust). I think since then they've been trying too many things to tweak things, whilst irritating their users.They even added a new "Max" thinking mode, and made "High" the old medium, which is ridiculous because you think you're using "High" but really you're not. There's a hidden config file to change their terrible defaults to let Claude be smarter still, and apparently you can toggle off the 1M tokens.I think the real fix, and I'm surprised nobody there has done this yet, is to let the user trim down their context window.Think about it, you used to have what? 350k tokens or so? Now Claude will keep sending your prompt from 30 minutes ago that's completely irrelevant to the back-end, whereas 3 months ago it would have been compacted by now.Others have noted that similar prompting for some ungodly reason adds tens of thousands of extra garbage tokens (not sure why).Edit looks like someone figured out that if you downgrade your version of Claude Code and change one single setting it unruins Claude:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47769879

dacox: Yeah, I have been seeing lots of comments, tweets, etc, but given everything I have learned about these models - i do not think the change to 1M was innocuous. I'm not sure what they've claimed publicly, but I'm fairly certain they must be doing additional quantization, or at minimum additional quantization of the KV cache. Plus, sequence length can change things even when not fully utilized. I had to manually re-enable the "clear context and continue" feature as well.

giancarlostoro: I used the heck out of it when it was announced, and it felt like I was using one of the best models I've ever used, but then so were all of their other customers, I don't think they accounted for such heavy load, or maybe follow up changes goofed something up, not sure. Like I said, the 1M token, for the first few days allowed me to bust out some interesting projects in one session from nothing to "oh my" in no time.I'm thinking they should go back to all their old settings and as a user cap you at their old token limit, and ask you if you want to compact at your "soft" limit or burst for a little longer, to finish a task.

verdverm: One gripe I have with Claude Code is that the CLI, Desktop app, and apparently the Webapp have a Venn Diagram of features. Plugins (sets of skills and more) are supported in Code CLI, maybe in Cowork (custom fail to import) but not Code Desktop. Now this?The report that they are 90% Ai code generated seems more likely the more I attempt to use their products.

bottlepalm: Their source code leak showed how badly vibe coded Claude Code is, despite it being one of the best AI assistants.But yea there's some annoying overlap here with Cowork which also has scheduled tasks, in Cowork the tasks can use your desktop, browser and accounts which is pretty useful - a big difference from these Claude Code Routines.

dispencer: This is massive. Arguably will be the start of the move to openclaw-style AI.I bet anthropic wants to be there already but doesn't have the compute to support it yet.

dpark: What’s massive about cron jobs and webhooks? I feel like I’m missing something. This is useful functionality but also seems very straightforward.

eranation: +1 for that, having that said, because GH agentic workflows require a bit more handholding and testing to work, (and have way more guardrails, which is great, but limiting), and lack some basic connectors (for example - last time I tried it, it had no easy slack connector, I had to do it on my own). This is why I'm moving some of the less critical gh-aw (all the read only ones) to Claude Routines.

Put Claude Code on autopilot. Define routines that run on a schedule, trigger on API calls, or react to GitHub

mellosouls: Put Claude Code on autopilot. Define routines that run on a schedule, trigger on API calls, or react to GitHub events...We ought to come up with a term for this new discipline, eg "software engineering" or "programming"

raincole: Sounds more like openclawing.