Cron in plain English

Build-along · ~12 min at your own keyboard

Scheduled triggers are the 'while you sleep' half of automation: every weekday at 6am, every Friday at 4, first of the month. Modern platforms take the schedule in plain English. Rule stands: schedule the deterministic scripts, not the unattended LLM. This is the engine behind lead-follow-up automation that never forgets a day-3 check-in.

Your starter: Monthly roll pull

Workflow steps

Make it yours: Set the day the county posts, name the download path you actually use, and write what the note to you says when nothing changed.

MONTHLY PULL: [county] delinquent roll, runs the [day] of the month at [hour]

1. Open the file at [download path]. If it is older than 35 days, write 'Roll not refreshed' and stop.
2. Run the delinquent-list steps on it and write the new tab.
3. Diff against last month's tab: new parcels, parcels gone, amount changes.
4. Write [folder]/roll-[month].md with the first line: '[n] new, [n] gone, [n] changed.' If all three are zero, the first line is 'No change.'
5. Each new parcel ends with [PULL THE RECORD: assessor card]. Nothing else happens to it until I pull that.

Never contact anyone. Never estimate a value. Record first, then the number.

The coach checks that what you paste back is your own work. The starter pasted back unchanged won't pass.

Do this

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Share what happened

Paste the schedule, evidence of two untouched automatic runs, and their outputs (trimmed).