Anthropic shipped Routines for Claude Code on May 15, moving the persistent agent runtime off your laptop and onto Anthropic's infrastructure. A Routine bundles a prompt, repository access, and connected tools or services, triggered on three surfaces: cron-style schedules, HTTP endpoints with auth tokens, and GitHub webhooks. Before this, running a Claude Code agent on a schedule meant your own cron on your own box โ when the box went down or the session closed, the agent died with it. Routines remove that constraint by operating the runner on Anthropic's side.
The trigger split is what's actually new. Scheduled routines cover the existing 'cron my Claude Code session' pattern but without a session โ Anthropic spawns the runtime per fire. API-triggered routines expose an HTTP endpoint with auth tokens, turning a Claude Code workflow into a callable service. Webhook routines launch on GitHub events filtered by PR-match conditions and persist across the PR lifecycle, watching the thread instead of one-shot firing. The Routine object โ prompt plus repo access plus connected tools โ is effectively an agent-definition schema, conceptually adjacent to OpenAI Assistants and Cursor rules but with the repository as the primary noun. What's not in the InfoQ writeup: pricing, usage limits, error semantics for hung routines, and whether routines inherit user auth or run with separate scoped credentials.
This positions Anthropic against GitHub Actions and GitHub Copilot agents more than against Cursor. Cursor is in-editor; Routines is repo-lifecycle plus external-trigger territory, which is where Actions lives. The economics shift: with local cron, the runtime cost was your own electricity; with Routines, it's whatever per-routine billing Anthropic publishes when it gets around to it. The reliability concern stops being academic โ when the agent runtime is operated by the same vendor whose model occasionally regresses, the local workaround of downgrading the CLI version disappears. The six weeks of Claude Code complaints Anthropic post-mortemed earlier this month are a different kind of cost when the user can't pull the process out of the cloud.
Monday: if you have a Claude Code workflow currently kept alive via tmux, screen, or a VPS cron, Routines is the direct replacement and worth a low-stakes trial โ a stale-docs scanner, a PR-triage bot โ before pricing and quotas firm up. If your workflow needs sub-minute response or guaranteed control over the runtime, keep it local. Watch for the first published pricing tier and the first Routines-specific outage post-mortem before moving anything load-bearing.