For a long time, Claude Code felt like a power tool you had to pick up and put down. You opened the terminal, did the work, and closed it. If you wanted Claude to do something while your laptop was asleep, like review a pull request, scan new issues, or summarise the week, you needed a separate setup. A cron job, a GitHub Action, some glue code, and a way to keep your credentials safe.

Routines remove all of that.

A routine is a saved Claude Code configuration. A prompt, one or more repositories, and a set of connectors, packaged once and run automatically on Anthropic cloud. You set it up once. You forget it. It keeps working when your laptop is closed.

This post walks through what a routine actually is, how the three trigger types work, and seven workflows I either run myself or set up for clients.…