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5. Orchestrating many agents

Cron (scheduled job)

Work that runs on a clock, no human involved — "every night at 2 a.m., sync the data and run the checks." (The odd name is from a decades-old scheduling program.)

Why it matters: recurring agent work — nightly reports, weekly digests, scheduled eval runs — all rides on this. Forgotten scheduled jobs also quietly burn money, so know what's on your clock.

Related: Eval