Scheduled automations

Nothing runs until you switch it on

Every automation in a new workspace is off. Not off-until-you-notice or off-in-the-free-plan: off, in the database, on the day the workspace is created. Masaro spends nothing on a schedule you did not ask for.

You will find them at Scheduled in the sidebar. Each row names what it does, when it would run, and what it is allowed to change, before you touch the switch.

Three tiers, and the tier is the promise

What an automation may do is fixed by its tier. The tier is not a setting you can edit, because “this one only reports” is worth nothing if it can be turned into “this one edits.”

• Report: reads and tells you. Writes nothing at all. The daily brief is this.
• Propose: drafts a change and waits. Nothing moves until you approve it, and dismissing costs you nothing but the reading. Cycle planning is this.
• Act: makes a bounded set of changes directly, recording the before-value of every field it touches so one click undoes the run. Backlog grooming is this.

The built-ins

Daily brief (report, personal). What happened while you were away: agent runs, hand-backs, triage arrivals and overdue work, every morning at a time and timezone you pick. It reads through your own access, so it can never show you a task you could not open yourself. It is per-person, not per-workspace: an admin does not get to decide who receives a morning digest.

Backlog grooming (act, workspace). Works through tasks that arrived since its last run and fills in the obvious gaps: labels from your existing vocabulary, an estimate where none exists, and a flag on likely duplicates. What it may not do is the important list: no status changes, no rewriting your text, no assignment, no archiving. Every change it makes is reversible from the run history.

Cycle planning (propose, workspace). When a cycle rolls over, it drafts a diff over the new week: keep what still matters, drop what quietly stopped mattering, add what should fill the rest. Each line carries a one-sentence reason you can disagree with, every line is individually toggleable, and the whole thing is a proposal until you approve it. A banner on the cycle strip is the only place it interrupts you.

Your own automations

Beyond the built-ins you can describe one in your own words — “every weekday morning, summarize what the agents did overnight and flag anything blocked” — and Masaro parses it into a schedule, a scope and a tier, then shows you a confirmation card before anything is saved. If what you asked for needs more power than the tier allows, the card says so and offers the version it can actually do, rather than quietly under-delivering.

Three limits, each doing real work:

• Report or propose only. An arbitrary prompt does not get write access.
• Daily at most. No hourly custom runs: spend and noise both scale with frequency.
• Three enabled per person, ten per workspace. A cap on accumulated timer spend, raised on evidence rather than on request.

Every run leaves a record

Expand any automation for its history. A run says whether it completed, proposed, failed, was skipped or was missed — and a skip says why: switched off, nothing to do, budget, credentials, or a creator who is no longer a member.

Act-tier runs list what changed and offer Undo this run. Undo restores each field only if it still holds what the automation wrote; anything you have edited since is left alone and reported, so undo can never quietly overwrite your own work.

Missed runs are recorded, never replayed. If Masaro is down past a fire time, you get a note in the history rather than a backlog of stale briefs arriving at once.

What an automation can reach

A personal automation runs under its creator’s live membership, so it can never do something that person could not do by hand — and it stops working the moment they leave the workspace. Workspace automations act on everyone’s board and are managed by owners and admins; members can see them, because work that changes the shared board should not be invisible to the people it changes it for.