Jobs, workflows, and webhooks

Everything your agent builds in Kody can run without the agent. That is the difference between an automation and a chat transcript. Kody has four ways to start work when nobody is typing, and every one of them runs a package you own — no model in the loop, no tokens spent.

Prefer the event that actually describes the moment — a webhook or a subscription — and reach for a schedule when no event exists. Cron is fine; it is just not the hero.

Jobs — recurring schedules that travel with the package

A job is declared in the package manifest, so the schedule ships with the behavior it runs:

{
	"kody": {
		"jobs": {
			"daily-digest": {
				"entry": "./src/daily-digest.ts",
				"schedule": { "type": "cron", "expression": "0 8 * * *" },
				"timezone": "America/Denver",
				"enabled": false
			}
		}
	}
}

• The entry is a package-local module with no arguments. The usual shape is a thin wrapper that calls a callable export and sends notify-self mail only when there is something to say.
• Publish with "enabled": false, invoke the wrapper once from execute to prove it, then enable. A schedule you have never run once is a schedule you will debug at 8 a.m.
• Each run gets a job-scoped scratch bucket; shared durable state (cursors, the last seen id) belongs in packageStorage().
• jobUpdate adjusts schedule, timezone, enabled state, params, and expires_at; jobRunNow fires one run for debugging. Name and source stay in the repo — change them there and publish.

Jobs do not hang off an integration or an MCP connection. If a "job" has no package, save the package first. Runs show up on /account/jobs.

Workflows — deferred and durable one-shot work

A workflow is a durable run Kody executes later, outside the request that asked for it. Use one instead of plain execute for:

• later — runAt in the future ("remind me Friday", "retry after the window")
• longer — batch sweeps, migrations, polling loops, or steps that would exceed execute's ~90 second budget; workflow steps get a longer sandbox
• once — an idempotencyKey makes a repeated create return the existing run instead of starting a duplicate

import { workflows } from 'kody:runtime'

export default async function main() {
	return await workflows.create({
		exportName: './rebuild-index',
		runAt: new Date(Date.now() + 15 * 60_000),
		idempotencyKey: 'rebuild-index:2026-09-08',
	})
}

workflows.create takes either code (a complete module string) or exportName (a saved-package export). Inspect runs with workflowRunList, cancel with workflowRunCancel; they appear on /account/workflows. Recurring work is a job, not a workflow that reschedules itself.

Inbound webhooks — the external HTTP knock

A webhook gives a package a public, credentialed URL. A provider POSTs to it and Kody dispatches the validated request to the package export that owns it.

1. Declare it under package.json#kody.webhooks: a name, the export it binds to, and (for vendor senders) verification — HMAC header, encoding, and the name of the signing secret in your secret store. One webhook name binds one export; there is no wildcard.
2. Store the signing secret with secretSet under that name.
3. Mint the URL with webhookUrlMint and paste it into the provider. The URL secret is returned only on mint or rotate — treat the URL as a credential.

Declaring a webhook does not open ingress; minting does. Deliveries are rate-limited per webhook (default 60 per minute, at most 600), and body-only HMAC is replayable unless you opt into a timestamp window or delivery-id header. Full contract and payload shapes: Inbound webhooks.

Sentry noise, GitHub events, Stripe payments, a shortcut on your phone, a CLI on your laptop — anything that can POST JSON can start a package this way.

Subscriptions — events from inside Kody

When the trigger is something Kody already knows about — a message landing in your inbox, a repo push, a run error, an integration losing auth — a package subscribes to that topic in package.json#kody.subscriptions and Kody invokes the handler with the event payload. packageSubscriptionDispatch sends a synthetic event so you can test a handler before the real one arrives. Topics, payloads, and package-emitted events: Subscriptions and events.

The inbox is a trigger too

Every account has an email address. Mail that arrives there is stored and emits email.message.received, so "forward it to Kody" is a valid trigger for people and systems that can send email but cannot call an API. The same inbox is how a job tells you it finished: emailSend mails the account's own address and nothing else. See Email primitives.

Choosing well

• A schedule is optional, not the point. If the person cannot name a time they want something to happen, leave the trigger off and let them ask.
• Test before you enable: invoke the wrapper from execute, dispatch a synthetic event, or send yourself one webhook.
• Keep the wrapper quiet. Notify only when there is news; an empty digest every morning trains people to ignore the real one.
• Failures and recent runs for every trigger live on /account/activity.

Where to go next

• Package lifecycle — testing a scheduled wrapper before enabling its schedule.
• How Kody works — one loop from ad hoc question to a daily email that stays quiet until something ships.
• Workflows — the full workflows.create reference.