Drill 9 · Rehearse a Routine for Free

⚠️ Throwaway repo. Set a limit first. Routines can run unattended overnight — that's the whole point of this drill, and the whole reason it stays a dry run until you've watched it once.

The scenario

Routines are the unattended, cloud-run cousin of /loop — they fire on their own schedule whether or not you're at the keyboard, which makes the first one you ever create the highest-stakes button you'll press in this whole course. This drill lets you fill in every field of the creation form, on a real repository, without ever letting the routine's body actually execute against anything live.

What you'll do

Using a real repo you control, fill out a Routine's creation form completely (see A2 in the Routines appendix for every field), but set its prompt to a dry-run instruction: describe, in prose, exactly what it would do this beat — which files it would read, what it would write, what it would skip — without writing anything. Let it fire on its real schedule for at least 3 beats.

# Claude Code — Routine prompt, deliberately a dry run
Describe what this beat WOULD do: which files you'd read, what you'd compute, what
you'd write to <target file>, and why. Do not write anything. Log this description
as one line to loop-run-log.md tagged "dry-run".

# OpenCode — cron-triggered dry run
opencode run "DRY RUN ONLY. Describe the beat's intended reads/writes without
  performing them. Append one 'dry-run' line to loop-run-log.md." # via cron

Done when (provable stop)

• The creation form is filled in completely — repo, connectors, trigger, prompt — and you can name what every field does, not just what you typed into it.
• The Routine fired on its own schedule at least 3 times, unattended.
• Every fired beat produced a dry-run description and zero real writes — verified by git status showing no changes each time.
• You've read A5 — reading the runs and can point to where each run's evidence lives.

When it goes wrong

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Sources: Routines and the creation form come from Scheduled Tasks: The Loop Skill & Cron Tools (S4) and Panaversity's Loop Engineering: A Crash Course (S1), §19. Full attribution: resources/sources.md.