Show HN: Crnd – Cron daemon built for scripts and AI agents

4 points

4 months ago

Been using cron forever but every modern alternative wants me to click through dashboards or write 50 lines of yaml. So I built crnd (pronounced "crowned") - just a CLI that does what you tell it.

Main thing: no prompts, no interactive wizards. Just commands that work in scripts.

`crnd schedule -n backup -s "0 2 * * *" -- rsync -a ~/docs ~/backup`

Thats it. Jobs live in a toml file that hot-reloads. Daemon runs as a real OS process, not some container abstraction.

Also supports one-time scheduled jobs which cron cant do: `crnd schedule -n reminder -i 5m -- say "stretch break"`

Built it mainly because I'm using AI coding agents and they kept choking on interactive prompts. Now they can just parse --json output and schedule stuff.

No cloud, no docker, no account. Just a single binary.

https://github.com/ysm-dev/crnd

Would love feedback - especially if youre automating things with scripts or agents.