Cron Prompt Pattern

# Cron Prompt Pattern

How to write prompts for isolated cron jobs that wake up with zero context, so they don't chase stale goals or send irrelevant updates.

## The Problem

Cron jobs are stateless. Each execution starts from nothing — no conversation history, no memory of previous runs, no awareness of what changed since the job was written. The prompt is their entire world.

This creates a specific failure mode: **stale execution**. A cron job written to monitor a price target keeps running after the purchase was made. A briefing job reports on a project that was cancelled last week. A health check alerts on a service that was intentionally taken offline.

Without a context gate, cron jobs operate on the assumptions baked into their prompt at creation time. The world moves on; the cron job doesn't.

**Real failure modes:**
- Price monitor keeps alerting after the item was bought
- Daily briefing reports on a project that was shelved a week ago
- Deployment checker watches a repo that was archived
- Meeting prep job fires for a meeting that was cancelled
- Reminder job sends a reminder for a task that was completed

## The STEP 0 Pattern

Every cron job prompt starts with a context gate — a mandatory first step that reads current workspace memory before doing anything else.