Automation
Background tasks on a schedule, goal mode, reminders, and the OS-level daemon that runs them when loop is closed.
Two different things share a similar name, so start here:
- Background tasks (
/background) run detached from your session, headless, tied to a directory — on demand, once, or on a cron schedule. They can fire when loop isn't even open. - Goal mode (
/goal) drives the session you're in autonomously until a verifier agrees the objective is met.
Background tasks
/background in the TUI is the manager: add, edit, run now, or hand a task to the scheduler.
Three schedule kinds:
| Kind | Means |
|---|---|
| on demand | No schedule. Runs when you say so. |
| once | A single future run — 10m, 18:30, 2026-06-15 09:00 |
| cron | A recurring expression — 0 9 * * 1-5 is weekdays at 09:00 |
Each task carries its own text, schedule, working directory, model, and agent. You can run one immediately as a headless background run, or reopen its last run as a normal session to see what it did.
From the shell
loop background (alias loop goals) does everything the TUI does:
loop background list
loop background add "check for dependency updates" --cron "0 9 * * 1"
loop background add "summarize today's commits" --every 1d --cwd ~/code/api
loop background add "run the smoke tests" --at "18:30"
loop background run A1B2
loop background rm A1B2
loop background tickOptions for add:
| Flag | What |
|---|---|
--cron "<expr>" | Cron schedule |
--every <30m|2h|1d> | Interval — sugar over --cron |
--at "<when>" | Run once (18:30, 2h, tomorrow 9:00) |
--cwd <dir> | Directory the task runs in (default: here) |
--model <provider/model> | Model for scheduled runs |
--agent <name> | Agent the task runs under |
Ids are shown as short prefixes; any unambiguous prefix works for run and rm.
tick runs everything that's currently due and exits — that's what the scheduler calls, and it's what you'd wire into your own cron if you'd rather not install the daemon.
The scheduler daemon
Scheduled tasks run on an OS timer — launchd on macOS, systemd on Linux, Task Scheduler on Windows — so they fire whether or not loop is running.
loop background daemon install
loop background daemon status
loop background daemon uninstallOr /daemon in the TUI. Without it, scheduled tasks only run when something calls tick.
Goal mode
/goal ship the auth refactorGoal mode runs the current session on a loop until the objective is actually done:
- Planner writes a frozen plan. No plan, no goal.
- Turn runs with the goal rules injected.
- Continue — unchecked plan boxes become the next directive.
- Verifier does a read-only audit of the workspace. A clean verdict ends the goal; a refutation feeds the gaps back into the next turn.
The verifier is adversarial on purpose — it's looking for reasons the work isn't done, which is what stops an agent from declaring victory on a half-finished refactor.
Esc pauses. /goal resume picks it back up. Step caps and detected stalls auto-pause rather than burning tokens forever.
Reminders and timers
/timer 25m— a timer that surfaces in the TUI/reminder— one-off nudges tied to the project/recap— what happened recently in this directory
These are lighter than background tasks: they notify, they don't run the agent.
Composing it
A realistic setup:
loop background daemon install
loop background add "review open PRs and flag anything risky" --cron "0 9 * * 1-5" --cwd ~/code/api --model anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6Pair that with the Telegram bridge and the results land on your phone.