Building an automation
There is no builder to open and no form to fill. You build an automation the same way you'd ask a capable assistant to take something off your plate: you describe it. What follows — compiling the recipe, checking connections, estimating cost, confirming with you, and arming it — happens in the conversation. This page walks the whole path, from the first sentence to a standing behavior you can forget about.
Start with a sentence
Say what you want to happen, and on what rhythm or trigger.
The whole interface is a sentence. Describe the outcome, when it should happen, and where the result should go — as much or as little as you have in mind. The assistant fills in the rest and asks about anything it needs, like your timezone for a clock-time schedule.
| What you say | What you get |
|---|---|
| “Watch this page and tell me here if it changes.” | A watch delivering to the conversation |
| “Every weekday at 8, email me the top 5 from this feed.” | A weekday morning email digest |
| “When my form is submitted, screen the lead and save the good ones to my CRM.” | A webhook pipe with a judgment gate |
| “Give me an address to forward receipts to, and pull the totals into a sheet.” | An email-intake automation that reads documents |
What happens when you ask
Between your sentence and a live automation, a few things happen — visibly.
- 01It compiles the recipeYour description is turned into an ordered recipe — the trigger, the steps, the destination. You’ll see a short live status as it works: compiling, then checking connections, then arming.
- 02It picks up any judgment models with youIf a step needs AI — screening, summarizing, reading an image — the assistant shows you the fitting models with their per-run costs and you choose. Nothing runs on a silently-chosen model.
- 03It checks connectionsIf the recipe uses one of your tools, it confirms that tool is connected. If not, the automation lands as a draft with a clear list of what to connect.
- 04It confirms and armsYou get a confirmation with everything you need to know, and the automation begins running on its trigger.
The confirmation
Before it's live, you see exactly what you're getting.
The confirmation is the contract. It tells you, in plain terms:
| The confirmation shows | So you know |
|---|---|
| That it's live, and its cadence | When and how often it will run |
| The first run time | When to expect the first result |
| Any webhook URL or intake email | Where to point your form or what address to forward to |
| An estimated monthly cost | What it will cost to run at this cadence |
| How it repairs itself | Whether it fixes itself automatically or asks you first |
| An offer to test it now | That you can prove it works before trusting it |
Test before you trust
Two ways to see an automation work before you rely on it.
You never have to take an automation on faith. You can exercise it immediately in one of two ways:
| Way | What it does | Side effects |
|---|---|---|
| Run it now | Fires the automation once, for real, right away — bypassing the schedule. The result shows up like any run. | Real: it delivers, writes, and is charged like a normal run |
| Preview it | Runs the whole recipe with everything mocked and shows what each step would have done. | None: nothing sends, nothing writes, nothing is charged |
Preview is the safe way to check the shape of an automation before it’s live; run-it-now is how you confirm a real delivery lands where you expect. A webhook automation, run now, replays its most recent received event so you can test the pipe without re-sending anything.
If a connection is missing
An automation that needs a tool you haven't connected waits for you.
If your automation writes to a CRM you haven’t connected, or sends through an account that isn’t linked, it doesn’t fail and it doesn’t run half-broken. It’s saved as a draft, and the assistant tells you exactly which connection to make. Connect it, and the draft arms itself automatically — you don’t have to rebuild anything. See Reliability and self-healing for how drafts behave.
Editing by conversation
Change an automation the way you built it — by talking to it.
Every automation has a home conversation, and that’s where you change it. “Actually, email me instead of posting here.” “Only alert me on drops over 10%.” “Add my teammate to the digest.” The assistant updates the recipe in place — it doesn’t make a second automation — and every edit is saved to the automation’s version history. You can also ask it to show you the current definition any time you want to review what it does.
Watch-this from the browser
Turn the page you're looking at into a watch, without describing it.
When you’re on a page worth watching, the browser companion can arm a watch on it directly — you don’t have to paste the URL or describe the page. It runs through the same build flow, so you still choose how picky the watch is and where it delivers, but it starts from “this exact page” instead of a description.
Pausing, resuming, retiring
An automation is yours to stop, restart, or remove at any time.
| Action | What happens |
|---|---|
| Pause | It stops running but keeps its state and history; resume it later exactly where it was |
| Resume | It re-arms and picks its schedule back up — this also revives a draft once its connection exists, or an automation that was budget-paused or healing |
| Delete | It's removed along with its history, after you confirm — the one irreversible action, so it always asks first |
Pausing is the reversible way to mute something you might want back; deleting is permanent and always asks for confirmation. And if an automation goes dormant on its own for long enough, the platform pauses it for you and lets you know — it’s never quietly deleted out from under you.
Recipes to borrow
A starting shelf of automations worth stealing.
Change watching
“Watch this competitor’s pricing page and tell me here only if the price really changes.” “Watch this changelog and email me a one-line summary of anything new.” “Alert me when this metric drops more than 10% below its weekly average.”
Digests
“Every weekday at 8, email me the top five stories from this feed.” “Each morning, give me a rundown of the emails I got overnight.” “Every Monday, summarize what changed on this page over the week.”
Inbound pipes
“When my form is submitted, screen the lead, save the serious ones to my CRM and open a task, email me a heads-up, and drop the junk.” “Give me an address to forward invoices to, and pull the vendor, date, and total into a sheet.”
Outreach that asks first
“When a new contact comes in, wait a day and send an intro, then wait three days and send a follow-up — but let me approve the follow-up before it goes, and never send outside business hours.”