Blog
Notes on cron and on scheduling jobs across machines.
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Scheduled AI Agent Failures: What Breaks Differently From a Cron Job
A scheduled agent run fails in ways a shell script doesn't: it can "succeed" and still be wrong. A runbook for the failure modes specific to running agents on a timer.
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AI Agents Need Scheduling Too, and Most Agent Tooling Skips It
Agents can plan, call tools, and act on their own, but little tooling gives them a reliable way to run later. This post covers why scheduling gets left out of most agent stacks.
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Dead Man's Snitch Alternative for Teams That Outgrew Ping-and-Pray
Dead Man's Snitch is a simple cron monitor: a URL you curl, and an alert if you don't. Here's when that's exactly right, and when you need something that can also fix the job.
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How Infra Teams Actually Schedule Work in 2026
What systemd timers and Kubernetes CronJobs fixed compared with cron, what they left alone, and the operational problem all of them share.
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AI-Generated Cron Schedules: How Natural-Language Scheduling Works
What happens when a natural-language scheduling request becomes a cron expression: where LLMs are reliable, where they fail, and why validation matters more than generation.
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Cronitor Alternatives in 2026: What Each One Does Differently
A comparison of Cronitor alternatives (Healthchecks.io, Dead Man's Snitch, Sentry Crons, cron-job.org, Better Stack, and more), with pricing and who should pick which.
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Healthchecks.io Alternative for Teams That Want to Fix Jobs, Not Only Watch Them
Healthchecks.io is a good open-source heartbeat monitor. Here's when it's the right call, and when you need a control plane that can edit jobs too.
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Why Monitoring-Only Cron Tools Are a Trap (You Still Have to SSH In)
Heartbeat monitoring shortens time-to-detection, not time-to-fix. The mechanical gap between knowing a job failed and actually fixing it, and what closes it.
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How to Manage Cron Jobs Across Multiple Servers
Five approaches to managing cron across a fleet of servers (SSH loops, config management, central schedulers, systemd timers, and monitoring) and when each one is the right answer.
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The Cron Job Failure Runbook: What to Check When a Scheduled Task Silently Dies
An ordered diagnostic runbook for cron jobs that stop running without an error: the cron daemon, the crontab, logging, environment, permissions, locking, resource limits, and clock drift.
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7 Crontab Mistakes That Take Down Production
Seven crontab failure modes, each with the symptom, the root cause, and the fix, using real crontab lines and real shell.
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Cron Syntax Cheat Sheet: Fields, Shorthand, and Edge Cases
A reference for cron schedule syntax: the five fields, the shorthand strings, and the edge cases that trip up experienced engineers.