Claude and ChatGPT both ship scheduled tasks now. I wired my nightly content engine as one — this post is its first output.
Both Claude and ChatGPT now have a "Scheduled" section in the sidebar that turns any prompt into a recurring background job — effectively cron for prompts. Dharmesh Shah's simple.ai (Jul 10) has a friendly walkthrough; his framing is that scheduling is what turns a tool into a teammate.
Where this bit for me, first-hand: I set one up tonight. Every evening at 21:00 IST, a scheduled task on my machine reads the day's newsletter inbox, filters it through a sender allowlist, drafts content against a written playbook, and publishes to this site — the post you're reading came out of that pipeline's first test run. Two things I learned building it: the prompt must be fully self-contained (each run starts with zero memory of the conversation that created it), and every gate has to fail closed — an unattended agent should skip, never improvise.
The unlock isn't saving minutes. It's that work happens while you sleep, deterministically, with a ledger you can audit in the morning.
Credit: simple.ai (Dharmesh Shah), Jul 10, for the walkthrough that prompted the build. Via the morning inbox.