Lab 2: A daily report on a schedule

Goal

Make an agent that produces a short report every weekday morning without you pressing anything.

Design brief

• Goal: a morning briefing from a public page you care about.
• Input: a fixed address, supplied by the schedule.
• Tools: http.fetch.
• Output: a short report in the run result, and optionally an email.
• Approvals: notify.email always waits for you, so decide whether the email is worth the tap.
• Limits: one run per weekday and a small monthly budget.

Steps

1. Create an agent named "Morning briefing" and tick http.fetch under Tools.
2. In What should this agent do? paste:

You write a daily briefing from one public page.
1. Fetch the page address in the run input with http.fetch.
2. List up to five items that look new or important, one line each.
3. End with one sentence of what to watch for tomorrow.
Use only what is on the page. If the page cannot be fetched, say so and stop.

1. Run it once by hand with Run agent and the page address, to check the output first. Always test before scheduling.
2. In Triggers, tick On a schedule. Under Repeats choose Weekdays. Set Hour (0-23) and Minute (0-59) to your preferred morning time, and choose your Time zone.
3. In Input for scheduled runs enter the page address.
4. Set Per run (USD) to a small amount and a Per month (USD, 0 = no limit) amount that covers about a month of weekday runs with room to spare.
5. Choose Save changes. A sentence under the form describes the schedule in words, and Next run shows when it will fire.
6. Optional: tick notify.email and add "End by emailing me the briefing" to the instructions. Understand the trade-off: each day's email will wait in Approvals until you approve it.

Check your work

• Next run shows a time on the next weekday at your chosen hour, in your time zone.
• After the first scheduled run, open Runs, filter How it started by On a schedule, and see the run with its trace.
• If you added email, the run shows Waiting for your approval until you decide.

Switch it off when you are done

Choose Pause (then save) at the top of the page and then Save changes. A paused agent shows a warning banner, and its schedule does nothing until you Resume (then save).

Variations

• Use pgb.database.query to report on a project database you own. It is read-only.
• Use Custom (cron) for patterns like "first Monday of the month".

What you learned

• Schedules turn a manual agent into a routine, so test by hand first.
• Unattended agents need budgets, and every unattended write needs a human gate.
• Pause is the off switch.