Automations: the four-object model
Agents are who. Missions are goals. Workflows are procedures. Automations — new and first-class — are when. Plus: watch your agents actually think, with streamed chain-of-thought.
We shipped schedules twice this week and both times something felt off: the cron lived inside the mission or the workflow, and the Automation page was a read-only rollup you couldn't create anything from. The root cause was a missing object. Today it exists.
Automations are the WHEN
# workspace/<org>/automations/morning-briefing.yaml
when: { schedule: "0 12 * * 1-5" }
do: { checkMission: daily-revenue-briefing }
An automation binds a trigger — a schedule or an event — to a piece of work: run a workflow, or check a mission. It's the cron/crontab separation: scripts don't know their schedule. Missions and workflows now contain zero trigger logic.
That completes the four-object model:
| Object | Is |
|---|---|
| Agents | who works for you |
| Missions | goals a team owns — agent-driven, no steps, no schedules |
| Workflows | deterministic procedures — same steps every run |
| Automations | when things happen |
The litmus test we now enforce in the schema: workflows are deterministic, missions are
agent-driven. If you can write the steps down and they're identical every run, it's a workflow.
If it takes judgment about what's needed this time, it's a mission — and an automation checks it
on whatever cadence you choose. (The short-lived agent workflow step is gone; it was open-ended
work wearing a procedure costume.)
Dashboard → Automation is now a real list of these objects: human-readable cadence, what each one fires, and the live next-fire time from Temporal.
Watch the team think
Set VOCION_THINKING_BUDGET=2048 and chat streams the model's actual chain of thought —
Anthropic extended thinking, surfaced live as a Reasoning step in the work timeline (dim tail while
streaming, full text after). Combined with last release's live step headers ("Delegating: Pipeline
Analyst… · 32s"), a long turn is now fully legible without being a firehose.
Missions got a real home
Clicking a mission now opens its detail page: the full charter (goal, success criteria, deliverables), the team, which automations check it, recent check runs, a Check now button that fires the same pass the automation runs — and the backing YAML, viewable and editable inline.
Docs: Automations · Missions · Workflows.