Duties

A duty is a job a bot performs on an interval, which stops and asks you when it reaches something it should not decide alone.

That last part is the point. Anything can run a prompt on a timer; what makes this useful for real work is that it is told, in advance, what it is not allowed to settle.

The four fields

What            Compare ledger.csv against statement.csv, line by line,
                and list what does not match with its reference and amount.

Rules           A difference under 1.00 is rounding. Ignore it.

Escalate when   Any single line over 10,000.

Every           24 hours

What and Rules are kept apart deliberately. The work is the same every morning; the refund ceiling is a policy somebody revisits. Merged into one prompt, changing the number means re-reading the whole instruction to find it.

Escalate when is written in words, not as a condition. It is given to the model as an obligation, not evaluated by the product — which means it is only as reliable as the model reading it. Write it as something checkable: any single line over 10,000, not anything unusual.

What happens when it escalates

The duty stops. It appears in Bots → Waiting on you with the question it could not answer, and will not run again until you reply.

Your answer is carried into the next run, so the bot does not ask twice about the same thing.

A duty that has already asked will not file a second question — it repeats the open one.

What it remembers

A duty keeps notes between runs. A run that learned one thing writes down that one thing; it does not have to restate what it already knew, and a run that failed halfway does not take the rest of the notes with it.

Writing an empty value is how something is deliberately forgotten.

Where it runs

In the bot's department directory, which is the whole of what the run may write to. A duty pointed somewhere else is held until you allow that place by name — see Sandbox and approvals.

Duties, and scheduled tasks

Both run a prompt on a timer. The difference is what they belong to.

	Belongs to	Escalates	Remembers
Duty	a bot, in a department	yes	yes
Scheduled task	nothing	no	no

Use a scheduled task for every morning at nine, tell me what changed. Use a duty for work with a policy attached.