The Claude desktop app went through a significant redesign recently, cleaner interface, better project management, and a new feature called Routines that lets you schedule Claude to run tasks automatically.
What Routines Do
A Routine is a scheduled instruction set. You define what Claude should do and when. Examples: every Monday morning at 8am, pull the last week of news headlines in your industry and write a summary. Every Friday, check your project folder for any files flagged as TODO and generate a task list.
The Limitation
Routines in the current implementation run locally, they need the desktop app to be open. They are not cloud-scheduled in the way that a cron job is. For any routine that needs to run whether or not your laptop is open, you still need a server-side solution.
How We Use It
Morning briefing: open Claude, Routine runs, gives a summary of overnight emails and calendar for the day. End-of-day: code review summary of what changed in the repo that day. These are tasks that used to require manual prompting, now they just happen.