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Claude Cloud Routine vs. GitHub Actions cron: they look the same but you manage them differently

·322 words·2 mins
Author
jeonck
Running a handful of Hugo/Docusaurus sites on GitHub Pages, and writing down the problems and fixes along the way.
Table of Contents

When maintaining a site that publishes a new post every day, the first thing worth confirming is where the automation actually runs — otherwise it’s easy to go debugging the wrong place.

Two different patterns
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A few earlier pipelines (insight, invest-news, etc.) followed a familiar shape:

  • a pipeline/ directory with a collector script in the repo
  • a cron-triggered workflow under .github/workflows/
  • Actions handling collect → generate → commit → deploy end to end

But a site built later had none of that — no pipeline/ directory, no collector script anywhere in the repo. The Actions workflow there did only build and deploy.

Cause
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Publishing for that site was owned by a Claude Cloud Routine. The routine itself performs the web search and writes the Markdown post, then pushes it — and that push is what triggers the Actions build. In other words, the logic deciding what to write lived outside the repo entirely, on Claude’s own schedule.

# searching the repo turns up nothing about the schedule or routine ID
grep -r "cron" .github/workflows/   # only the build/deploy workflow shows up
find . -name "pipeline"             # nothing

How to check and manage it
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  • Routines can only be managed at https://claude.ai/code/routines (deletion included — only possible there).
  • The schedule is a fixed-UTC cron, which matters across DST transitions. E.g. 0 11 * * * UTC is 06:00 CDT, but once the clocks fall back to CST that becomes 05:00 local — the cron needs updating to 0 12 * * * to keep it at 6 AM.
  • To change publishing format or content, edit the repo’s root CLAUDE.md rather than the routine’s prompt — if the routine is designed to read that file to decide its behavior.

Takeaway
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When inheriting a site with automated publishing, don’t assume “no cron workflow visible” means “manually published.” A Claude Cloud Routine living outside the repo is an increasingly common shape for this.