Automations

Overview

Automations let Arden act on its own – daily summaries, inbox monitoring, reminders, or any task you would otherwise need to start manually. Each automation has one or more triggers (when to run), a standalone prompt (what to do), an optional short description for display, and optional notification behavior through configured notifiers. Multiple triggers use OR logic.

Trigger types

Scheduled

Run at a specific time, optionally on specific days:

Every weekday at 09:00 → "Summarize my unread emails and calendar for today"
Every day at 22:00 → "Review what I committed today and update my work log"

Interval

Run repeatedly at a fixed interval, with optional time windows:

Every 2h → "Check for new emails from VIP senders and notify me"
Every 30m (09:00–18:00) → "Monitor the deployment pipeline status"

Event-driven

Trigger before calendar events:

15 minutes before any meeting → "Pull up notes about attendees from memory"

Idle

Fire once after a period of user inactivity. Resets when the user sends a new message.

After 5 minutes idle → "Extract facts from recent conversation"

Count

Fire every N user messages in a session. The counter resets per session.

Every 10 turns → "Extract durable facts from the conversation"

Slack message

React to new Slack messages in named channels. Use this for a watcher instead of polling Slack on a timer. Add a sender filter when an auto-approved automation must not be driven by arbitrary senders.

Automation channels

Each normal automation gets a new durable channel session by default. Its runs land in a transcript you can open, read, and reply to. A loop is different: it always attaches the current chat instead of creating a channel.

Tool scoping

An automation can carry a tool scope: an allowlist of exact names or prefix patterns such as slack_*. It grants write/action tools on top of the normal read-only floor; use the narrowest scope that performs the task. auto_approve skips approval only for tools already granted by that scope. See tool scoping.

Area agents

Area agents are channel automations seeded one per delegated area. Their explicit tool scope includes the terminal submit_area_report action that validates and commits work, evidence, asks, and the next-check cadence.

Builtin automations

Arden ships with Memory Maintenance, Memory Retention, Memory Synthesis, Wiki Maintenance, and optional Memory Dream. When managed wiki history is enabled, Memory Storage Maintenance also prunes derived storage safely. They appear under System. You can pause them, adjust their cadence, or run them now.

Creating automations

From chat

Use the automation tool in chat:

Create an automation that runs every weekday at 9am
to summarize my unread emails and today's calendar.
Notify me with the result.

Via the API

curl -X POST http://localhost:6877/automations \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ARDEN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "Morning briefing",
    "prompt": "Summarize unread emails and today's calendar events. Report the briefing in the automation channel.",
    "description": "Weekday morning briefing",
    "trigger_type": "time",
    "at": "09:00",
    "days": "weekdays",
    "idempotency_key": "automation:morning-briefing",
    "idempotency_scope": "global"
}'

Multiple triggers:

curl -X POST http://localhost:6877/automations \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ARDEN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "Extract conversation facts",
    "prompt": "Extract durable facts from recent conversation.",
    "description": "Conversation fact extraction",
    "triggers": [
      {"type": "count", "every_n": 5},
      {"type": "idle", "idle_minutes": 10}
    ],
    "idempotency_key": "automation:extract-conversation-facts",
    "idempotency_scope": "global"
  }'

Stable creation keys

Send a stable semantic idempotency_key with idempotency_scope: "global" for every standalone automation. Reuse the exact pair only when a create request has an ambiguous outcome. First list automations to find the existing producer; update it instead of creating a date- or version-suffixed duplicate. An explicit deletion releases the key so the same job can be recreated with its original identity.

Approvals and permissions

By default, mutating or external actions still require approval. Grant only the needed actions through tool_scope; toggle auto-approve only when those already-granted actions must run headlessly without per-call approval. Examples that may need auto-approve:

sending email
posting to Slack
creating calendar events
writing files or updating external systems
creating, editing, or archiving results below automations/ in the managed wiki

Notifications

Configure notifier destinations in Settings → Notifications or through the notifier API. Automations can use the notify tool to send results to configured channels such as Telegram, email, Slack, or shell commands.

Getting Started

Features

Integrations

Reference

Overview

Trigger types

Scheduled

Interval

Event-driven

Idle

Count

Slack message

Automation channels

Tool scoping

Area agents

Builtin automations

Creating automations

From chat

Via the API

Stable creation keys

Approvals and permissions

Notifications

​Overview

​Trigger types

​Scheduled

​Interval

​Event-driven

​Idle

​Count

​Slack message

​Automation channels

​Tool scoping

​Area agents

​Builtin automations

​Creating automations

​From chat

​Via the API

​Stable creation keys

​Approvals and permissions

​Notifications

Overview

Trigger types

Scheduled

Interval

Event-driven

Idle

Count

Slack message

Automation channels

Tool scoping

Area agents

Builtin automations

Creating automations

From chat

Via the API

Stable creation keys

Approvals and permissions

Notifications