Since Claude released routines, I’ve had a blast finding ways to automate my code. I have a laundry list of personal projects in my GitHub repository that I work on with Claude, daily. I regularly have 5+ Claude code sessions coding away on random thoughts and prototypes all at once. So when routines released, I wondered how different it would be over scheduled tasks for cowork. The beauty for me is in the tool calls.
I use Claude Cowork to run a daily financial market analysis and refine a daily thesis that’s ready in the morning. Scheduled runs prompting at a given time and day are a part of cowork that I love. Cronjob with more intelligence.
Claude routines can use my GitHub integration to run everything in the cloud without my machine being on. It pulls my project code, uses a managed instance to run everything and pushes it back to Git after it’s done. It operates like a coding partner for me at night.
Just like that, I now have a bunch of Claude Code routines that trigger nightly, review my project codebase for issues, propose enhancements. Every morning I end up with a list of bug fixes and proposed enhancements. I recently changed my routine to straight up pick an enhancement to work on so when I get up the feature is ready for PR. Claude documents the change, performs security and dependency reviews, and summarizes the change every night. My projects are slowly building themselves as I direct projects rather than code them.