At noon today my phone buzzed with a Slack message from Claude. My laptop was closed. The agent had already pulled my afternoon meetings, found my Slack handle, and sent the DM itself. I built it in about ten minutes, and it runs every weekday whether I'm at my desk or not.
That's a cloud routine in Claude Code. Here's how to build yours.
What a cloud routine actually is
Claude Code has a feature called Routines. You write a prompt, connect your tools, set a schedule, and a Claude agent runs that prompt in Anthropic's cloud on repeat. Every weekday at noon in my case, but you can set it to 9am, daily, weekly, whatever fits.
The key thing: it doesn't run on your machine. It runs on Anthropic's servers. Close your laptop, go to a meeting, leave the house — the routine fires anyway. The agent has no idea where you are, and it doesn't need to.
What you need
- A paid Claude plan (Pro, Max, Team, or Enterprise). Routines are not on the free tier.
- The tools you want to use, connected at claude.ai/customize/connectors. For a calendar check-in you need Google Calendar and Slack.
How to build it (about 10 minutes)
Step 1: Connect your tools
Go to claude.ai/customize/connectors and connect Google Calendar and Slack if they aren't already there. One-time setup. Once connected, those tools are available to any routine you create.
Step 2: Write the prompt
This is the most important step. The cloud agent runs with zero context, so the prompt has to be completely self-contained. It needs to know who it is, what it's doing, and exactly how to do it.
Here's the prompt I use. Copy it and swap in your name, timezone, and Slack handle:
You are a scheduled accountability agent. Your job is to send [YOUR NAME] a midday Slack DM that includes their remaining calendar events for today.
Steps:
- Use Google Calendar to list today's events. Filter to only events starting at or after 12pm [YOUR TIMEZONE].
- Use Slack to find [YOUR SLACK NAME]'s user ID and send them a direct message.
- Format the message like this:
Hey [NAME] - midday check-in.
Your afternoon: [list each remaining event as time - title. If none, write "No meetings this afternoon."]
What are your top 3 priorities right now, and are you on track?
- Confirm the message was sent and stop.
The specificity matters. Vague prompts produce inconsistent agents. Tell it what to do, in what order, and what the output should look like.
Step 3: Create the routine
Three ways to do this, all writing to the same cloud account:
Web UI (easiest). Go to claude.ai/code/routines and click New routine. Name it, paste your prompt, attach Google Calendar and Slack as connectors, set the schedule, and save.
Claude Code (any session). Type /schedule in chat. It walks you through the same fields interactively, in plain English.
Desktop app. Click Routines in the sidebar, then New routine, then choose Remote. (Local would run it on your machine, not the cloud.)
Step 4: Set the schedule
Two things to know before you pick a time:
Schedules run in UTC. If you're in Sydney, noon is 2am UTC during AEST. The web and desktop interfaces convert the time for you. If you're using the CLI you'll need to convert it manually.
The minimum interval is one hour. Sub-hourly routines are rejected.
Pick your frequency, hit save. The routine is live.
What it looks like when it runs
Every weekday at noon, Claude spins up a fresh cloud session on Anthropic's servers. It calls the Calendar API to read your afternoon, finds you on Slack, and sends the DM. Your laptop can be closed. The message arrives either way.
You can trigger it manually from claude.ai/code/routines any time to test it before the scheduled run fires.
What else you can build on this
A noon check-in is the simplest version of this pattern. Once you see it working, the same setup generalises:
- A 9am routine that reads your inbox and surfaces the three emails that need a reply today
- A weekly routine that pulls your ad spend and flags the campaigns that are underperforming
- A Friday routine that scans your CRM for leads that have gone quiet and drafts follow-ups
Start here
Build the noon check-in. It takes ten minutes, and the return is immediate. Once it's running every weekday you'll have a real sense of what routines can do, and you'll start seeing the other places in your work where they belong.
Built by Alex Sidhu, Whitehorse AI.