Skip to main content

Scheduling actions in the GitHub Copilot CLI

The GitHub Copilot CLI keeps getting more capable. One of the newer additions is the ability to schedule prompts, either on a repeating interval or as a one-shot delayed action. Let me walk you through both approaches.


Two ways to schedule

The /every command schedules a prompt to run repeatedly at a specified interval, while /after schedules a one-shot prompt to run once after a specified delay.

Both commands are still experimental. They are only available if you have used the /experimental on slash command, or the --experimental command-line option first.

Use the following slash command to enable experimental mode in your session:

/experimental on

Recurring prompts with /every

Use /every when you want Copilot to repeat a task on a cadence during your session.

/every 10m Run the test suite and summarize any new failures
/every 1h Check for new comments on my open pull requests

A number with no suffix is interpreted as minutes — so /every 30 remind me to check for Slack messages schedules the prompt every 30 minutes. The minimum interval is 10 seconds and the maximum is 1 day (24 hours).

You can also schedule a skill directly:

/every 1d /review-architecture Improve the architecture of the project

Only user-invocable skills can be scheduled this way. You cannot include built-in slash commands such as /clear in a scheduled prompt.

One-shot delays with /after

Use /after when you want to fire a prompt once after a delay and then forget about it.

/after 30m Give me details of changes to README.md made in the last 30 minutes
/after 10m Check that the address finder is visible on example.com/register

The prompt fires once, after the delay has elapsed, and is then removed from the schedule list.

Important: if an /after schedule had not been triggered before you closed the session, it remains in the schedule list and will be triggered after the specified delay in the reopened session.

Managing your schedules

When a scheduled prompt is triggered, Copilot will include a prompt id like [Scheduled prompt #2] to distinguish it from a prompt you typed yourself. You can use the ID to cancel the schedule — for example, by entering stop prompt 2.

You can always view the list of active schedules. Therefore type /every or /after with no arguments.

To delete a schedule, use the arrow keys to move through the list and select the schedule you want to delete, then press d. Press Esc to exit the schedule list.

The catch: session-scoped only

There is one thing to be aware of when using scheduled prompts; prompts are scoped to the session they were created in. This means that they are only triggered while that session is running. Close your terminal and the schedules stop.

When a session is resumed, the schedule will be re-activated but nothing happens when the session is not active.

If you want to execute a prompt when no session is active, you need to schedule a prompt using the Task Scheduler or through GitHub actions or Azure DevOps pipelines.

More information

Scheduling prompts in GitHub Copilot CLI

Automating tasks with Copilot CLI and GitHub Actions

Quickstart for automating with GitHub Copilot CLI

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...
Read more

A complex system designed from scratch never works

A few years ago, I worked as an architect on a big mainframe rewrite. I still count it as one of my failures. Not because the technology was wrong, but because I couldn't convince the management team to simplify the approach. Years later, the organization is still struggling to get the new system up and running. I left the project at the time, because I couldn't put my name behind an approach that would take very long and cost a lot of money without a working system to show for it along the way. Gall’s Law That memory keeps coming back to me, because it's a textbook case of Gall's Law playing out in real life. Gall's Law , from John Gall's Systemantics , states it plainly: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works, and it cannot be patched to make it work. You have to start over with a simple system that works. What does that mean in practice,...
Read more