Task Assets: Agent Workflows That Run While You Sleep
This is part eleven in a series about managing the growing pile of skills, scripts, and context that AI coding agents depend on. Part nine covered workflow assets and resumable procedures. Part ten introduced the improve pipeline that continuously curates your stash. Earlier parts addressed teams, distributed stashes, and community knowledge. Most automation with AI agents is reactive. You open a session, give the agent a task, wait for the result, close the session. The agent's clock runs when you run it. Task assets flip that model. A task is a YAML file in your stash that defines a workflow — what to run, when to run it, what environment it needs, and how long it's allowed to take. Once registered, the task runs on schedule without your involvement. The OS scheduler calls akm tasks run <id> , which executes the task and writes the result to state.db . You find out what happened when you check akm health or look at the log. This is the piece of akm 0.8.0 that makes continuous operation possible. The improve loop runs twice an hour because a task asset says it does. The hourly Discord health report fires because a task asset says it does. Neither requires an open terminal. The Task Asset Format Task assets live at <stash>/tasks/<id>.yml . The filename is the task ID. A minimal task looks like this: schedule : 0 * * * * command : akm improve --auto-accept 90 enabled : true That's enough to install a cron entry and run akm improve at the top of every hour. The full schema adds metadata and per-task timeout control: schedule : " 7,37 * * * *" command : akm improve --auto-accept 90 --timeout-ms 1620000 enabled : true timeoutMs : 1800000 name : akm-improve description : Run the improve pass at :07 and :37 — reflect, distill, consolidate, lint, and eval. when_to_use : Twice per hour; leaves ~23 minutes of idle headroom between completions. tags : - improve - maintenance The fields that matter most: Field Required Purpose schedule yes Standard cron expression. Maps to cro