Shipping & Running
$definecron--plain-english
TLDRAn alarm clock that runs a job on a schedule.
The kitchen does not wait for you to remember.
A cron is a printed hour on the wall plus a task. "2 a.m.: dump yesterday's leftovers." "Monday 9: send the digest." Nobody is in the room. The hour arrives. The job starts.
That is different from a webhook. A webhook waits for the world to poke it — a payment, a signup, a GitHub push. Cron does not care what just happened. It cares what time it is.
Clock work vs click work
Hosts rename it. Scheduled functions. "Hit this endpoint every hour." Same wall. Same leftover.
The CLI will not invent a schedule for you. After npx create-hackhaton-space-stack@latest, the app answers humans. Cron answers the calendar. You add it when the demo has a leftover that would otherwise live in your head: cleanup, a digest, the thing you always forget between Saturday night and Sunday judging.
It is obedient, not wise
The wall does not ask if the task still makes sense. If the cleanup broke at 2 a.m., it will cheerfully break again at 2 a.m. Have it write a log line, or scream when it fails. A backup that ran is fine. A backup that stays quiet on the night it didn't is how you lose the demo data.
What this unlocks
Once you can name the wall, "we'll just remember to run it" stops being a plan. You either put the leftover on a clock, or you admit a human is the schedule.
A queue is a line for work that just happened. Cron is a line for work that is due. Workers do both. You just have to know which ticket printer you are standing at.
