Routines

A routine is work Pia does for you on a schedule — a Monday morning digest, a nightly check on a folder — without you being there. The result arrives as its own chat, and Flow tells you it’s ready.

Routines have their own page in the sidebar: click Routines. They run on this device, using your own providers and keys, and nothing is handed to a server. (If you want work to run on your Pia server instead, that’s Background Assignments.)

Creating a routine

New routine opens the editor. There are three ways to fill it in, and they all land in the same editable draft:

• By hand — type the fields yourself.
• Start from a blueprint — pick one and the editor opens already filled in, instruction and example values included, in the language Pia is set to. Blueprint wording is fixed at the moment you create the routine, so changing the interface language later leaves your existing routines untouched.
• Draft with AI — describe it in a sentence and let Pia write it.

Nothing is saved until you have read the draft over and pressed Save.

Describing a routine and letting Pia write it

Under Describe it in a sentence, say what you want to happen and how often. Draft with AI fills in the name, the instruction, the schedule and the tools the routine needs, in whatever language you wrote the description in.

A drafted routine is only ever offered the tools this device actually has, and only the ones it names are ticked. Tools Pia does not ship are never on offer, so a draft cannot grant one.

If the name and the instruction are already written, the draft has nothing to fill in and says so — clear a field to let it write that one.

Being asked the things Pia cannot guess

Advanced…, beside Draft with AI, starts from the same single sentence and then asks — which day the routine should run, what shape the answer takes, whatever else it cannot work out on its own — and fills the editor in from your answers. The same button sits on templates and personas.

The interview can be run by a persona of your choosing, picked on its first card. That persona decides which model answers every turn, the finished draft included, so a persona routed to a private model keeps the whole interview on it.

You can drag a mail or a document straight onto any box the interview asks you to fill in, and onto the opening sentence. Its text is read out and put in for you. Word, Excel, PDF, Outlook messages and plain text files all work.

The fields

Field	What to put in it
Name *	What you’ll recognise it by in the list.
Goal *	What Pia should actually do. Write it like you’d write it in chat.
Type	Research — look something up and report back. Agent run — a full agent run with a plan and tools. Meeting — join and transcribe a Teams meeting.
Repeats	Once, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly, or Manual only.
Time (HH:mm) *	24-hour clock, e.g. 09:00. Weekly, monthly and yearly routines also ask for the day or date.
Persona	Which persona answers, or Use the active persona. Kept on this device only.
Working folder	The folder this routine reads and writes in. Kept on this device only.
Reasoning effort	Overrides the persona’s own setting for this routine’s runs.
Changes this routine may make on its own	The write tools its runs may use without anyone there to approve them.
Quiet: no notification when it succeeds	For monitor routines that mostly report “nothing changed”. Failures still notify you, and the result chat is always saved.

Fields marked * are required, and Save stays switched off until they are filled rather than refusing after the click. A meeting routine asks for the Teams link and the recording acknowledgement in place of the goal.

A routine’s instruction may be as long as the task needs, and Pia lays a task with several parts out as a numbered list in the order it should happen.

The working folder

A routine reads and writes inside its working folder, and the chat a run produces opens on it. Pick it with the same folder browser a chat uses. The folder is remembered on this device only, and a routine that never had one keeps working across the whole assistant files folder.

Which tools a routine may use on its own

Changes this routine may make on its own lists only the tools that change something. Reading a file, searching your notes or looking at a chat never needed permission in the first place, so those are not listed — their absence does not mean the routine cannot read.

• Tick a tool and this routine’s runs may do it without asking.
• An agent-run routine with nothing ticked may still use write_file. Ticking any tool replaces that default rather than adding to it.
• A research routine with nothing ticked only reads and reports.

Caution

This is a standing permission for an unattended run. Nobody will see an approval card for those tools — the routine just uses them. Grant only what it genuinely needs.

Routines that never run on their own

Manual only is a repeat setting that never fires on a schedule. Use it for a routine you start by hand — a long task you want set up once, with its own folder, persona and tool grants. Its next run stays empty rather than waiting for a time.

Managing routines

Each routine shows its status, when it runs next, when it last ran, and its recent runs.

Status	Meaning
Active	Scheduled and enabled.
Off	Disabled — it stays in the list but won’t run.
Stopped after failures	It failed too often and Pia stopped scheduling it.
Done	A Once routine that has already run.

The buttons on a routine are Edit, Enable / Disable, Run now, and Delete. Run now starts it immediately in the background.

A failed run says why. The run list under a routine shows the reason beneath Failed — a server or provider message word for word — and opening the chat of a failed chat-mode routine shows the request and the failure rather than an empty chat.

Note

Routines sync across your devices, but only one device owns a routine’s schedule. On the others the controls are read-only. Edit it on the device that owns it. The working folder, the persona and the reasoning effort are kept on each device separately.

Starting a routine from a chat

Ask Pia in a chat to run one. Tag it with @Routine and say to run it: Pia asks you to confirm, then the routine runs with its own working folder, persona and tool grants, and its answer arrives as a new chat.

This is different from pasting the routine’s instruction into a chat, which would run the work in the chat you are in, with that chat’s folder and permissions.

Asking Pia to create one

You don’t have to use the editor. Ask in chat — “every Monday at 9, research what’s new in our competitors’ releases” — and Pia offers to create the routine. You’ll get an approval card showing the name, goal, type, schedule, provider and granted tools before anything is saved, and it then shows up in the list like any other.

If Pia wasn’t running

Routines need Pia to be open. If a routine’s time passes while the app is closed, Pia asks the next time you start it:

‘Weekly digest’ was scheduled for Monday 09:00 but the app wasn’t open. Run it now in the background?

Choose Run now or Skip this run. Skipping doesn’t affect the next scheduled run.

Tip

If you rely on routines, turn on Launch at Windows startup and Start minimized to system tray in General Settings.

Limits

Routines run under the Background & scheduled runs limits in Settings → Assistant → Agent runs — 24 steps, a 45-minute time limit, 2 re-plans on failure, and 2 background runs at a time. These apply to every routine; they aren’t set per routine.

The Auto-approve Pia’s own write tools setting applies to agent-run routines only. It’s off by default, which means an unattended routine can use the tools you ticked in its editor, and anything you’ve marked Always allow in Tool Permissions.

Next Steps

• Agent Runs — what an agent-run routine actually does
• Flow — where finished routines turn up
• Tool Permissions — what unattended runs are allowed to do