Stale page: the huddle is being renamed and rebuilt as the Task Manager, so this page will be rewritten. Treat what it says as out of date until then.

Schedules and nudges

The huddle can start work on its own. A schedule sends a project's session a message about an item at a set time, once or on a repeat. A nudge wakes an idle agent about work that has gone quiet. Both run in the app's backend, so they work with every browser closed and survive a restart.

Schedules

What happens when an item comes due

At its time, Carnivore sends the item's project session a message about it, exactly as send to carnivore would, with a line naming the item. If the project has no running session, its newest asleep session is woken and sent to; if it has none at all, a new session is started in the project folder with its default launch profile, and sent to once it reaches its prompt. A busy session gets the send as soon as it is free.

How to schedule an item

Open the item and choose schedule... in its menu, or press the + on the scheduled section's header for a new scheduled item.
In the editor, set the title, the instructions (what the session is is sent when it fires), the first time and the repeat.
Save. The row shows a clock and the time ("today 3:00 pm", "tue 9:00 am") and the item sits in the scheduled section until it fires.

Repeats

Repeat	Fires
does not repeat	once
every day	daily at the picked time
on weekdays	on the days you toggle, at the picked time
every n hours	every 1 to 168 hours
monthly	on a day of the month at the picked time (the 31st falls back to the month's last day)

Times of day are New York time and stay put across daylight saving changes. A repeat that was missed while the app was down fires once at startup, then carries on; a week offline is never a burst of fires.

Changing, pausing and stopping

Click a scheduled item's time to open the editor and change it.
pause and resume a repeat on the row; a resume whose time has passed waits for the next occurrence instead of firing at once.
stop ends it.
run now in the editor fires the item immediately through the same path.
Ticking or deleting the item cancels its schedule. An item in todo does not fire: a one-time trigger is spent and says why, a repeat waits quietly.

All scheduled items across every list are also listed, read only, on the Automations page's huddle tab.

Nudges

What a nudge does

With the nudge on, Carnivore watches for work that has gone quiet and sends one short send to the project's idle agent. It nudges about:

a claimed item gone quiet: the agent is working it but nothing moved. The nudge says why the agent holds it: it set the item working itself, or it picked up your send and has not replied yet;
an item waiting to install: built but not installed, with the agent idle;
an open item nobody claimed, offered to an idle agent;
an idle agent holding nothing, pointed at the top open item in your order.

It never nudges a busy session, never starts a new session (it may wake the newest asleep one when the project has none running), and never nudges about an item that waits on you, is scheduled, or is in todo. Each nudge leaves a quiet line on the item's thread.

When an item gets stuck

Each nudge waits longer than the last (one interval, then two, then three). After the set number of nudges and one more interval with no change, the item is flagged stuck: unstick it, moves to needs you, and one toast tells you.

How to turn it on

For a project: the bell on the project's bar in the huddle, or the swarm section of the edit project modal.
For one session: the session's row menu in the sidebar, swarm: nudge when idle (it reads swarm: stop nudging while on). A session's own choice beats its project's.

Settings

Setting	Default	Range	What it does
nudge minutes	60	15 to 1440	quiet time before the first nudge
nudge tries	3	1 to 10	nudges before the item is flagged stuck
held send minutes	30	1 to 1440	how long a fire's send waits for a busy session

Troubleshooting

The row says "not sent: ...". The fire failed; the reason is on the row and in the open item. A failed one-time fire is not retried: set a new time.
A scheduled item on the shared list never fired. The shared list has no project to wake or start a session in; it needs a running agent session.
Nothing gets nudged. The nudge is off for the project and the session, or every agent is busy.

Send to carnivore and the send queue
The Automations page: docs/automations.md

For AI: key facts

fire_at on task_manager_add, task_manager_update and batch add and update ops: ISO 8601 with a UTC offset, in the future; "" cancels. A time with no offset is refused.
repeat: {freq: "daily", time: "HH:MM"}, {freq: "weekly", byweekday: [0-6], time} (Monday is 0), {freq: "hourly", interval: N}, {freq: "monthly", monthday: 1-31, time}; "" stops repeating. paused pauses or resumes. fire_now: true runs it now (refused on approved or todo).
Read task_manager_schedules_list before scheduling to see what already fires.
An item's start_trigger shows kind, fire_at, fired_at, last_error, repeat, paused, last_fired_at.
Nudge sends start huddle nudge:; answer on the item. Stuck items carry needs_action: "unstick" and nudge: {count, last_at, stalled}.
Routes: PATCH /api/v1/cplugs/huddle/items/{id} (fire_at, repeat, paused), POST .../items/{id}/run-now, GET/PUT .../lists/{key}/prefs ({nudge}), GET/PUT .../sessions/{session_uuid}/prefs.

updated 2026-10-11