alt Hacker NewsMaybe. The problem of "execute task on a cron" is something I've noticed the industry seems to refuse to solve in general, as if intentionally denying this capability for regular people. Even without AI, it's the most basic block of automation, and is always mysteriously absent from programs and frameworks (at least at the basic level). AI only makes it more useful on "then" side, but reliable cron on "if" side is already useful.
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I don’t recall if IFTTT had/has a basic cron or not, but it sure has/had put a lot of basic automations in the hands of the general public. Same for Apple Shortcuts, to some extent, or Zapier.
Agree. How would you solve this in general, what would be the ingredients? People use things like zapier, n8n, node-red to achieve this today but in many cases are overkill.
Most of the industry today is educated to avoid manual hacky solutions on single servers. You need to have fancy UI, frameworks with easy feedback and layers on top of layers who maintain other layers. Cron is an ancient tool with arcane syntax which offer barely anything out of the box, you have to know it and work it to get something out of it.
And there is also the mindset to avoid boring loops, and prefer event driven solutions for optimal resource-usage. So people also have a kind of blind spot for this functionality.