This New Claude Code Feature is a Game Changer

Key Takeaways

Cloud Code can now remind you to do things, check on things proactively for you, and work for days straight without you ever touching it or needing to give any input. So, here you can see I just said, "Remind me at 10:23 a.m. to check on my project." It goes ahead and uses a cron create tool to set this reminder. There we go. 10:23 just hit. I didn't touch it. And it just said, "Hey, Nate, this is the reminder to check on your project." So, just shot off this one that says, "Every 10 minutes, check my ClickUp to see if there's any new developments on our project." It's using the loop skill, as you can see, which is a new built-in skill. And it creates a cron for every single 10 minutes. And now this would run for the next 3 days every 10 minutes until I told it not to. And this doesn't have to be every 10 minutes. It could be every hour. It could be every 5 minutes. It could be whatever interval that you want. And this is all thanks to the newly released feature or skill loop, which is a powerful new way to schedule recurring tasks for up to 3 days at a time. And this is so funny because less than 12 hours before this was announced, the scheduled tasks in cloud code was also announced. So, right off the bat, those two features might seem like they're the exact same thing, but they're actually super different in how they work, and they have different use cases. So, in today's video, I'm going to break all of that down and tell you everything that you need to know about it. And by the way, if you haven't watched my new scheduled tasks video, then check that out right up here and then hop back over to this one. All right, so as you guys just saw in the quick demo, we now have the ability to use loops, which means that we could say something like /loop every 5 minutes, check on the deploy, or we could just say that in natural language, which is awesome because it invokes the loop skill and then it creates that cron job right here in cloud code. And you'll notice that this is in my VS Code. So this is available in your terminal, in cloud code desktop app, in VS Code extensions, wherever. This is just a core part of cloud code now. So if you're not seeing this, just make sure you update your extension or you update Cloud Code. And this lets you set up loop intervals or reminders. So reminders, like you saw that first demo, I just said, "Hey, at this time, just tell me this." And in that session, it will bump up a message without you triggering it. Or you could have them be intervals. So you could say every 2 hours. You could say every 30 minutes. Whatever you want that actual interval to be. And what's cool about it is it does it all in the same session. So if I leave this session up, every 10 minutes, it would check everything right here, which means that it's able to continuously read through what happened in the past one, and it continuously sees what we're doing. Now, obviously there are some pros and cons there, but just wanted to point that out. The major con there being your context, making sure that if something does go off every 10 minutes, you're not going to get a huge report and then every 10 minutes you just more tokens, more tokens, and then context rot. It's basically scheduling a prompt that you would be sending in here and then firing off, which means you can loop skills. So, if you want every 20 minutes, for example, run a skill called review PR, you could tell it to every 20 minutes run the skill. It would run it, it would wait 20 minutes, and then it would do it again. And of course, you could use actual slash commands to invoke both the loop and the skill. Or you could just say every 20 minutes, run my review PR skill. And of course, the onetime reminder feature. So at 3 p.m. or in 45 minutes, remind me to do this or check in on that. And Claude will basically pin that time. It'll create that cron, and then once it's done, it'll just delete itself. So whether that's, hey, at 4:30, remind me I have to go do this or every hour remind me to just stand up and like look away from my screen for 5 minutes, it can do that. All right. All right. So, there's a couple things that I wanted you guys to understand about how this actually works. So, let's just play around a little bit. Hey, at 10:40 a.m., can you please remind me to take out the garbage? Cool. So, what that's going to do is it's going to use the cron create tool and it's going to create that basically schedule to remind me take out the garbage. And what you can see here is the actual prompt. So, at this interval, which is just how cron works, it's basically going to shoot a prompt into this window that says remind Nate to take out the garbage. You can see the recurring equals false. Now, of course, the key is if the session is closed, then that cron is going to automatically be killed. So, now something interesting. I'm going to open up a new session and I'm going to say, hey, every hour, can you just remind me I need to stretch my neck? And I'm going to shoot this one off. And we'll see how this one is a little bit different because this once again creates a cron. We have a prompt. And you can see in this one, we don't have the recurring equals false. We just know that this cron is going to go every hour. But these loop jobs or task jobs are per session. So these two tabs are two different sessions. So if I came into this session and said, "Can you please tell me all of the scheduled loop tasks that we have today? It's going to use a tool called cron list, and it only can see the 10:40 a.m. take out the garbage." It cannot see the task that exists in this session because they're independent and they're separate. Now, one interesting thing to notice is that this session didn't actually invoke the loop tool. The loop tool basically tells it how to set up cron jobs and how to use the cronate. So if you don't see loop, don't worry. It's still actually doing this in a loop. It's just kind of about the actual wording. So, if I was to open a new one, let's see if I actually call the loop tool right here. So, I do loop and then I just say, you know, um, check my ClickUp. This one is going to default, I believe, to 10 minutes if you don't specify a time. And it might invoke the loop skill because we actually called it to, but looks like it didn't because it knows exactly what it needs to do already. So, the point being, all that matters is that the cron is being created. It doesn't always matter if it invokes the loop skill or not. And then if you wanted to cancel one of these jobs, all you'd have to do is either close out of the terminal or just say, "Actually, I don't need this anymore. Go ahead and cancel it." And that one invokes a different cron skill called cronde delete, it shoots over the job ID. And now that is canceled. And one final thing to keep in mind is in VS Code, if you close out of a tab and then you just open up that conversation again, that still will kill those crons. So you guys just saw how pretty much all of this worked. We have cron create to schedule. We have cron list to list them. And then we have cronde delete to cancel them. And all of those can be invoked with natural language, which is awesome. So now let's get into some of the limitations and then I'm going to compare them to the actual scheduled tasks feature. So the first big one is that we have a 3-day loop expiry, which is just basically for safety. It auto cleans things up if you forgot you had all of these loops running. So once you create a loop, it basically has a 3-day timer on it. It can run for day one, it can run on day two, and then on day three, it can run up until that last fire, and then it will autodee. And if you want anything longer than 3 days, then you would either just recreate that loop or that probably indicates that you should just turn this into a legitimate scheduled task. Now, the other thing that you can do is if you want to completely disable scheduling, so maybe in your natural prompting it's accidentally creating all these crrons, you could go into your environment variables and just disable that and it would probably be able to help you figure that out. So the other things here are that if you close the terminal, your tasks are gone. It doesn't have catchup. So the scheduled tasks, if you, you know, opened up your desktop app and you missed a bunch, it would catch up automatically. This doesn't do that. And there's no persistence, meaning after your 3 days and you wanted to do that same loop again. It would be a fresh session. But obviously, there's tons of things you can do here with context management and reading different files in order to kind of Frankenstein your own fix there. So now that all the features have been explained and you've seen a demo, I think that probably you understand the difference between the loop and the schedule tasks a bit better now. But let's just go over some of the key highlights. The loop has your 3-day expiry. It's all done within one session and there's no catch-up. It's basically a help me now or help me on this project for today type of function. The schedule tasks are dis stored. They're longived. They have catchup and these are like daily, weekly, monthly functions that can run indefinitely. Of course, with both of these though, the terminal or you know the app has to be open and this one is only currently available in the desktop app. But I can imagine how fast Anthropic is shipping things. Maybe by the time you watch this video, scheduled tasks are already out for the terminal and extensions as well, the way that loop is available in cloud code everywhere. So basically, it's one simple question. Do you need help right now on a project or do you need help with something every day or every week? And that's how you decide if you use the new loop feature or if you use scheduled tasks. So I thought I'd end off real quick by giving a few maybe practical ways that you could actually use loop rather than something scheduled. So maybe all day you're waiting on a very urgent email. Just set up Cloud Code to check in on that email every 5 minutes and if it's there, it can automatically let you know. Maybe you're working on a deploy and you want to just pull that and check every, you know, hour or so if everything's working okay. Maybe you've got a deadline due at the end of the week and you need a 3-day sprint to be constantly checking in on the team and checking in on progress. Maybe you're testing and iterating. Maybe you're watching logs. Maybe you're tracking changes. There's so many different use cases here. There's so many different ways to use the loop to prompt an agent to have different files, to use different skills, and it's really, really cool the way that you could potentially set these things up. But now that you understand all of the power with these loops, the next step that I would recommend is trying to build your own executive assistant. So, I just dropped a full video about how that works. You can watch that one right up here. So, hopefully I see you guys over there. But that's going to do it for today. So, if you enjoyed, you learned something new. Please give it a like. Definitely helps me out a ton. And as always, I appreciate you guys making it to the end of the video. I'll see you on the next one. Thanks everyone.