[FEATURE] Cowork scheduled tasks should be able to manage their own schedule or create bounded follow-ups
Problem
Cowork scheduled tasks appear to run in a restricted execution context that cannot manage scheduled tasks from inside the task itself.
That means a scheduled run cannot do common automation patterns such as:
- cancel or disable its own schedule once a stop condition is met
- adjust its next run based on what it just observed
- create a follow-up scheduled task as part of a multi-step workflow
This makes scheduled automations much less composable than normal Cowork runs.
Example use case
A periodic monitoring task runs every N minutes until it sees a success condition. Once that condition is detected, the natural next step is for the task to stop its own schedule (or replace itself with a lower-frequency follow-up task). Today that flow appears to be blocked by the scheduled-task restrictions.
Expected behavior
Scheduled Cowork runs should have a supported way to manage scheduling when acting on their own workflow, for example by allowing one or more of the following:
- self-cancel / self-disable
- self-update (change cadence)
- creation of a bounded follow-up scheduled task
If unrestricted nested scheduling is intentionally disallowed, a narrower policy would still help a lot:
- allow a scheduled task to modify or cancel only itself
- optionally allow creation of a single child/follow-up task with guardrails
Why this matters
Without this, many useful automations require a human to step back into the loop just to stop or re-shape a task that already has enough information to do the right thing.
The current behavior is understandable as a safety measure, but it feels stricter than necessary for self-management and simple handoff cases.
Suggested improvement
Either:
- Support self-management for scheduled tasks directly, or
- Document the restriction clearly and expose a safe alternative API/pattern for "stop when done" and "schedule follow-up" workflows.
Environment
- Cowork scheduled tasks
- Reproducible in the restricted scheduled-task execution context
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