Proactivity

Proactive agents in Snippbot act on their own initiative — surfacing timely insights, delivering digests, and taking autonomous actions without waiting for an explicit user prompt. Proactivity bridges scheduled automation and reactive chat-based interaction.

How proactivity works

Proactivity is implemented through two complementary systems:

Scheduler — Jobs defined with cron, interval, or natural language schedules. When they fire, the agent executes its goal autonomously and delivers results to a channel.
Channel proactivity — The channel adapter system can be configured to allow agents to send messages to platforms (Slack, Telegram, Discord, etc.) without the user first sending a message.

Smart scheduling

The SmartScheduler learns from your activity patterns to suggest optimal times for proactive jobs:

User typically active: 09:00–12:00, 14:00–17:00 (Mon–Fri)
Suggested time for "daily digest": 08:55 (5 min before typical start)

The scheduler builds a UserActivityPattern from session timing data and uses it to propose schedules when you create a new job without specifying a time:

"Send me a morning briefing every weekday"
→ Suggested: weekdays at 08:55 (your typical start minus 5 min)

Quiet hours

Proactive messages respect quiet hours to avoid notifications outside work hours. Quiet hours are optional and configurable:

Setting	Default
Quiet hours start	22:00 (configurable)
Quiet hours end	08:00 (configurable)

Proactive jobs that fire during quiet hours are deferred — their result is queued and delivered when quiet hours end, not dropped.

Proactivity levels

Each agent can be set to a proactivity level that controls how many insights it delivers per day:

Level	Max insights per day	Min delay between	Can interrupt
Silent	0	N/A	No
Cautious	1	4 hours	No
Balanced	3	1 hour	No
Eager	5	15 minutes	Yes (high priority)
Aggressive	Unlimited	None	Yes

Configure quiet hours and proactivity level in Settings → Channels → Proactivity in the Snippbot UI.

Enabling proactive delivery

Channel proactivity is disabled by default. Enable it per-platform in Settings → Channels in the Snippbot UI:

Open Settings → Channels and select the platform
Toggle Proactive Enabled to on
Set a Public URL (required for platforms that deliver webhooks) under channel settings

Common proactive patterns

Morning briefing

Goal: Summarize overnight GitHub activity, new issues, and PRs for my repos
Schedule: weekdays at 08:00
Delivery: Slack #engineering

Price or metric alert

Goal: Check if BTC price has changed by more than 5% since yesterday
Schedule: every 1h
Condition: only run if change > 5%
Delivery: Telegram @me

Daily digest

Goal: Compile a summary of completed tasks, pending items, and calendar events
Schedule: weekdays at 17:30
Delivery: Email summary

Anomaly detection

Goal: Check error rate from the last hour in Datadog; alert if > 1%
Schedule: every 15m
Condition: only if error_rate > 0.01
Delivery: PagerDuty webhook

Proactivity vs. reactive chat

	Reactive	Proactive
Triggered by	User message	Schedule or event
Approval required	Only for elevated actions	Per permission tier
Delivery	Chat interface	Channel or webhook
History	In chat	In scheduler run history

Delivery limits

Proactive message delivery is governed by the agent’s proactivity level (see table above). For example, a Balanced agent delivers at most 3 insights per day with at least 1 hour between each. An Eager agent delivers up to 5 per day with a minimum 15-minute gap.

Messages that exceed the daily limit are queued, not dropped.

Disabling proactivity for an agent

Each agent can have proactivity disabled independently in its settings. Useful during development or testing:

From the agent detail page → Settings → Proactivity: toggle Off