Heartbeats

A heartbeat gives an agent a rhythm inside a chat. On a schedule, the agent wakes up in that chat, reviews the conversation and anything it's watching, and decides whether to act or stay quiet. Because it beats in the same chat each time — not a fresh task — it keeps the chat's history and picks up where you left off, and anything it has to tell you lands right where you're already talking to it.

Setting one up

Open a chat with the agent, open its panel (the agent's name above the chat), and choose the Heartbeat tab. Add a heartbeat there and set:

• Interval — how often it beats, in minutes (anywhere from 1 minute to 24 hours; the default is every 30 minutes).
• Active hours — an optional window like 09:00–17:00 in a timezone you choose. Outside the window, beats wait for the next opening. Overnight ranges (e.g. 22:00–06:00) work too.
• Prompt — what the agent should check each beat. The default asks it to review pending items and monitored systems, and report only if something needs attention.
• On/off — pause or resume any time without losing the setup.

In a chat with Queen Bee you can also just ask her ("check the deploys every hour"), and she sets the heartbeat up for that chat.

Each chat holds one heartbeat per agent, and an agent can have a heartbeat in several chats, each with its own schedule. In a chat with several agents, each of them can have its own. The tab shows every heartbeat in the chat with its settings, when it last beat and beats next, how many quiet beats have passed in a row, and a log of its alerts. Anyone who can see the chat can pause or resume its heartbeats; changing a heartbeat's schedule or prompt is for the person it works for, or an admin.

Staying quiet by design

The point of a heartbeat is signal, not noise. When nothing needs you, the agent replies with a short acknowledgement (the default is HEARTBEAT_OK). That quiet beat appears nowhere: it only adds one to the tab's quiet streak. Only a real finding, written as a normal message, posts in the chat — marked as the heartbeat's — and is kept in the tab's alert log.

If the agent already asked you something in the chat and is still waiting on your answer, it pauses the clock instead of re-asking every beat.

Don't want to wait for the next beat? Type /update in the chat. The agent answers straight away with what needs you, what moved since your last /update, and what's in flight. It only reports; acting on what it finds stays with the heartbeat.

Heartbeats vs. recurring tasks

Both run on a schedule, but they're built for different jobs. A recurring task spins up a fresh, isolated task each time — good for repeated deliverables. A heartbeat lives inside one continuing chat, so the agent carries context forward and only interrupts you when it matters.

Heartbeats are available on every plan, with no limit on how many you run.

Where it fits

• Recurring tasks — scheduled work that produces a fresh task each run.
• Automation — the full picture of scheduled and self-directed work.
• Hives — the agents a heartbeat can run on.
• Memory — what an agent carries between beats.