Agent Heartbeat

The heartbeat is the agent's background reflection loop. On a fixed interval — always, not at a specific clock time — the agent wakes itself up with no user message, reads HEARTBEAT.md, and runs a short self-driven turn. It's the same idea Letta calls sleep-time agents: the subconscious that runs while the main agent is idle, keeping memory organized and catching things the foreground never gets around to.

URL: /settings?tab=agentHeartbeat

Typical uses

Good heartbeat jobs are interval-based, idempotent, and safe to no-op when there's nothing to do:

• Pending-work triage — look at open tasks / cronjobs, flag anything overdue, surface stale TODOs.
• External polling — check a connected inbox (email, GitHub, calendar) for new items since last tick, summarize urgent ones.
• Proactive context — if a scheduled meeting or cronjob is coming up within the next interval, pre-load the relevant wiki pages or draft talking points.
• Threshold alerts — watch a metric or external state (server down, deploy stuck, quota nearly hit) and notify when it crosses a boundary.

Heartbeat vs. cronjob

If your task starts with "every morning at 7…" or "on Mondays…", it's a cronjob, not a heartbeat job — use Tasks & Cronjobs for that. Rule of thumb:

	Heartbeat	Cronjob
Fires when	Every intervalMinutes, always	At a specific cron expression
Good for	Reflection, polling, maintenance	One-shot scheduled actions
Prompt source	HEARTBEAT.md (shared across ticks)	Per-cronjob definition
Duration limit	Short, every line runs every tick	Up to tasks.maxDurationMinutes
Idempotent?	Required — runs constantly	Not required

Enabled

Master toggle. When off, no heartbeat ever fires — all settings below are inert.

{ "agentHeartbeat": { "enabled": false } }

Heartbeat tasks

A card linking to /data/config/HEARTBEAT.md — the prompt the agent receives on every heartbeat tick.

Click Open editor to jump to the Agent Instructions page. Keep it tight: this text runs every intervalMinutes, so every line is a recurring cost.

For the default template, what belongs here, and what doesn't, see Agent Instructions → HEARTBEAT.md.

Interval

How often the heartbeat runs, in minutes (1 – 1440). Default: 30.

{ "agentHeartbeat": { "intervalMinutes": 30 } }

Night mode

Pause the heartbeat during a sleep window. Uses your configured timezone.

Enable night mode

Toggle the pause window on/off.

Start hour / End hour

Hour of day (0 – 23) when the window starts and ends. Crosses midnight correctly — startHour: 23, endHour: 7 means "pause from 23:00 to 07:00".

Example config with night mode enabled

{
  "agentHeartbeat": {
    "nightMode": {
      "enabled": true,
      "startHour": 23,
      "endHour": 7
    }
  }
}