Learn
What is a heartbeat agent?
A heartbeat agent wakes on a schedule or event and runs defined work without a human prompt — daily briefs, inbox sweeps, weekly reports. Heartbeats turn reactive chat into proactive roles; they are how businesses run on cadence, not only on demand.
In depth
Before heartbeats, agents only answered when asked. Businesses run on schedules — morning metrics, weekly pipeline review, monthly close. A heartbeat has four parts: trigger (cron, webhook, event), context refresh (pull current state from connectors), execution (agent acts, writes outputs, may escalate), audit trail (what ran, what changed, who approved).
Examples in a one-person company: daily 7am brief from overnight metrics; Monday content calendar review; monthly finance close draft; event-triggered onboarding when a customer signs up.
Rule: every role that owns recurring work should have at least one heartbeat. Roles without heartbeats wait like chatbots; roles with heartbeats behave like employees.
Neuro OS implements heartbeats as first-class product — Heartbeats per role, pausable, tunable, with run history.
Examples
- Daily 7am — ops role summarizes queue age and blockers
- Weekly Monday — marketing role reviews content performance
- Event — new Stripe charge triggers finance anomaly check
- Support — every 15 minutes, triage open tickets
- Neuro OS — heartbeat fires; role posts update or requests Ask approval
Related terms
FAQ
How is a heartbeat different from cron?
Cron runs a fixed script. A heartbeat wakes an agent that reads current context, may do nothing if nothing warrants action, and can escalate to humans.
What's the right frequency?
Match the work pace — support every 15 minutes, finance monthly. Over-frequent heartbeats create noise and burn tokens.
Can heartbeats deadlock?
Yes if A triggers B triggers A. Use explicit dependencies and test chains in staging.
Run governed agent roles on a company OS — not only definitions in a glossary.