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A routine is recurring or one-shot agent work that returns to the conversation where you asked for it.

Use it when you already know the request and only the timing changes: the same morning check, the same weekly summary, the same reminder next Tuesday. If the next message should shape the work instead, keep having the conversation.

Ask for one, then approve it

You do not fill in a form. You ask in the conversation, in the same words you would use with a colleague:

Do this check every weekday at 8am and post the summary here.

The agent replies with a proposal card, not a schedule. The proposal states:

It also shows the largest amount the routine could spend over the next 30 days, and how many times it would fire in that window, so the recurring cost is visible before you agree to it.

Nothing is scheduled until you click Approve. Dismiss discards the proposal and leaves the conversation unchanged.

Only a person can approve a routine. An agent can propose one; it cannot schedule its own work.

What an occurrence does

Each occurrence adds an ordinary turn to the same session. It reads like the rest of the conversation: the instruction, the agent's tool calls, and its reply, in order, alongside everything you asked by hand.

That is the point of returning to the conversation rather than to a separate record. The morning check and the follow-up question you ask about it sit next to each other, and the agent can see both.

An occurrence ends in one of four states:

Change or stop a routine

You can pause, resume, edit, or cancel a routine without changing the session or agent it belongs to. Editing changes later occurrences; occurrences that already ran keep what they did. These are API and CLI operations today; the app covers proposing and approving, not managing an existing routine.

Pausing is the safe first move when something looks wrong. A paused routine stops firing and keeps its schedule, so resuming does not require rebuilding it.

If the person who owns a routine leaves the organization, Mobius pauses their routines rather than letting them keep acting on that person's behalf. An administrator decides during offboarding whether each one is handed to the team or ended. See your work and team work.

Limits

A routine always has both spending ceilings, and they are separate defenses:

• The per-occurrence ceiling stops one occurrence once its recorded spend reaches the limit. The turn ends there and is recorded, rather than continuing to spend.
• The daily ceiling stops further occurrences after the rolling 24-hour spend across the routine reaches the limit.

Each occurrence is also an ordinary agent turn, so the agent's turn time limit applies to it, as do your organization's usage limits. See guardrails.

Each person may hold a limited number of active routines at once, ten by default. Cancel the ones you no longer read.

Public API and CLI

The API exposes /v1/routines for list and create, /v1/routines/{id} for read, edit, and cancel, pause and resume actions, and the occurrence ledger. The generated CLI presents the same operations under mobius routines.

Routine creation through the API requires a human owner, an existing reachable session, an invoke schedule, and explicit per-occurrence and rolling 24-hour ceilings. The conversational proposal and approval path is the normal flow; the API is for software that manages routines on a person's behalf.