A nightly agent job triages new issues. One night an issue arrives with a 400 KB log attached. The agent reads it, a tool call fails, the agent retries, and the loop runs until the month’s token budget is gone. Meanwhile cron, which has no idea what a token is, starts the next run on schedule. Now two copies are fighting over the same issue tracker.

Cron was built for jobs that cost nothing, finish in seconds and do the same thing every time. Agent jobs cost money per token, run for an unpredictable time and can loop. The useful ones are still boring and periodic: summarize what changed in a repo since yesterday, triage new issues each morning, check a competitor’s pricing page weekly. What they need is a scheduler that stays as small as cron and adds four things: a cost ceiling, a timeout that actually kills, an overlap rule, and state carried between runs. Anything past that is an orchestration platform, a different and much larger product.