Eight hundred people expected a tarot pull, a horoscope, and a fitness nudge from me every morning. I wrote all three by hand, at 6am, and I made it sixteen days. Day seventeen I overslept. Day twenty I quietly stopped, and a ritual built over months frayed in a week. The problem was never ideas; it was showing up at a specific minute every day, coffee or no coffee. So I stopped being the cron job. In x-rush, Automations takes a character you already talk to in AI Chat and runs it on a schedule you set once.
One character, one job
An Automation is a single scheduled task for a single character, and the binding goes both ways: a character carries at most one job, a job runs exactly one character. Bind Stella and she's locked in—edit the schedule all you like, but the form will never offer to swap in a different character. A different voice means a new character with its own job.
The restriction makes sense once you see what a run executes. Your character, whole: the persona and background notes you gave it, the ongoing chat you've had with it, and the compressed summary that quietly builds as you talk (the chat folds its notes down after every ten successful replies). My horoscope reader knows I'm a Leo who skims past generic money advice, because I told her that in chat months before I scheduled her. The 8am pull inherits the noon conversation. I never filled out a settings form about myself.
First, get a character worth automating
Automations lives at /workbench/text/auto and won't start from nothing. It wants a character that belongs to the current project and isn't bound yet. In the Default Project the platform's built-in characters can be bound as they are; anywhere else you create one in AI Chat first, and if the project has none, Automations says so and points you there before it shows you any form.
I made mine properly. Stella, the tarot reader, got six lines of tone rules: upright cards only, second person, never over 120 words. Grace, the horoscope writer, got my sign and a standing ban on the phrase "abundance is coming." The names are arbitrary and I'm not defending them.
Six steps, one form
Creating the job is a single form, and the form is the only place the config lives.
- Name and character. The character list only shows unbound ones. Stella was available; Grace was already carrying her own job.
- Task requirements. What to make, what it must include, what to avoid. Mine, verbatim: "morning pull, upright cards only, end with one action the reader can do before lunch."
- Web search. You pick on or off, explicitly. Stella got off. A card pull doesn't need the news.
- Output control. Language, length, format, fixed sections. I set English, capped her at 150 words, and left the rest on her defaults.
- Schedule. Daily, weekdays, or any custom pick of days; one run time per day; the timezone is printed on the step and saves as a setting, so a trip abroad doesn't silently move my 08:00.
- Confirm. A preview lays out the whole config, the next run time, and the fixed credit price per run. Enabling costs nothing; runs are what cost.
Two details earned their keep. Somewhere around step three my laptop died, and the half-filled form had already saved itself as a draft bound to Stella; it was waiting on my phone that evening. And before confirming I paid for one test run, same price as a real one, marked as a test in the history. You can skip it. I wouldn't: it's the only way to see the actual 8am card before you've committed to it.
Where the morning lands
At 08:00 the unread count on the site-wide chat bubble ticked up by one. The pull didn't arrive as a card in a separate feed. It arrived as a message from Stella, in her chat history, marked as an automated run; the same item is indexed in Automations' content list. One copy, two places.
From any automated item, the continue-the-conversation link drops you into Stella's chat at that exact message. No re-explaining which card I mean, no copy-paste. I told her "too mystical, action first" and she adjusted in the same thread. That reply bills as a normal chat message, not an automation run, and the context stays in one place.
The horoscope used to cost me twenty minutes of formatting every morning. Now it arrives formatted.
Every run, on the record
Each job's detail page keeps a run history, and it logs every status the content list doesn't show: running, failure, canceled, security-blocked, insufficient balance, and my favorite, skipped because the previous run was still going. Filter by status or by time.
The honest caveat: you can't curate this list. I went looking for a delete button on a failed test and there isn't one. That's deliberate. Runs are execution records, not content, and a failed run stays a failed run. Not a bug.
Failures mostly manage themselves. One automatic retry per run, free. Three failed runs in a row and the job pauses itself and tells you. The morning my credits ran dry, it didn't improvise a card from old knowledge; the run logged "insufficient balance, not executed," the job paused, and nothing fired again until I chose to resume and pick between one run now or the next scheduled 08:00.
I paused everything for a weekend trip expecting a pileup when I got back. No backlog; missed days stay missed, and the job waits for the next slot.
Editing, pausing, and the one heavy door
Editing reopens the same six steps. Changes sit as pending until you preview and confirm them, and the schedule keeps running the last confirmed setup in the meantime, so no half-edited config ever fires.
Deleting is the door with the second handle. The confirmation spells it out: future runs stop, the config is gone for good, the character is released. Stella's already-written cards stay in her chat history either way. Pause is the reversible move. Delete is for retirement.
What it doesn't do yet
- Text only. My pull is a card of words. No image, no audio.
- One run time per day per job. I wanted 7:00 tarot and 7:30 horoscope from the same character; the one-to-one rule says no. Two characters, two jobs, two times. That's the shape.
- No character swaps. Outgrow Stella and you build her successor, name and all.
The routing I never think about
I never pick a model. Each run routes to whichever text model suits the task (a 120-word card and a weekly digest don't want the same engine), and the routing moves as new models ship. The voice stays Stella's regardless of which one renders it.
Going deeper
- Automations — the six-step form, scheduling, run history, and the chat handoff
- Text Overview — how HTML Studio, Automations, and AI Chat chain together
- AI characters & chat — where the characters come from, and how to build your own
My mornings cost me about ten minutes of reading now, and the ritual stopped depending on my willpower somewhere around the first Tuesday I slept through and nobody noticed. Give the routine to a character you'd trust with it. Or keep the alarm; I did my sixteen days.