Automations

Automations let you create Emdash tasks on a schedule. Each automation creates a task in a specific project using a pre configured prompt and workspace settings on a cron schedule, and records a full history of every run.

Think of an automation as a saved "task recipe" that fires itself: "Every Monday at 10:00 UTC, in this project, spin up a worktree and ask the agent to find critical bugs."

At a glance

• Scheduled or manual - runs fire on a cron schedule, or you can trigger a run immediately using the run now button in the automation detail view for testing
• Project-scoped — every automation is attached to one project and provisions a workspace (new worktree, existing workspace, repo root, or sandbox) per run.
• Prompt-driven — each run launches an agent conversation seeded with the automation's prompt and provider.
• Self-healing scheduler — the main process keeps exactly one upcoming scheduled run per enabled automation and recovers runs interrupted by app restarts.
• Full run history — every run is persisted with status, timing, trigger kind, and any error, and surfaces the task/conversation it created.
• Convert automation runs into regular tasks - each automation run is a regular task that can be reviewed, edited, and converted into a regular task that is shown in the task list.

Getting started

1. Open the Automations view in the left sidebar.
2. Create: when clicking New automation you can configure:
   • Name: The name of the automation
   • Project: The project this automation should create tasks in
   • Schedule: When the automation should run
   • Prompt + provider: The prompt that should be run
   • Workspace settings: Let you configure where the task should be created (new worktree / existing workspace / repo root)
3. Enable/pause: a switch toggles whether the schedule is active.
4. Review runs: a list of all runs for this automation.
5. Convert run into task: a button to convert the last run into a regular task that is shown in the task list.

Automation run lifecycle