Tasks

Tasks are units of work assigned to workers. You can create and manage tasks by sending messages to the Bee (coordinator) in your IM platform — no API calls needed.

Task Types

OpenBee supports three task types:

Creating Tasks

Simply describe what you need in your IM conversation. The Bee will understand your intent, select the right worker, and create the appropriate task.

Immediate Tasks

Send a regular message and the Bee will create an immediate task for the matching worker:

"Assistant, write a summary of today's meeting notes"

Countdown Tasks

Include a specific time and the Bee will create a countdown task:

"Remind me at 3pm to submit the report"

"At 5:30pm, send me the daily metrics"

Scheduled Tasks

Describe a recurring schedule and the Bee will create a cron-based scheduled task:

"Every weekday at 9am, check for new issues and summarize them"

"Every hour, fetch the system status and report"

Scheduled tasks use standard 5-field cron format (minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week) internally.

Worker Selection

The Bee routes tasks to workers based on these rules (in priority order):

1. Explicit mention — If you name a worker in your message, the task goes to that worker
2. Conversation continuation — Follow-up messages go to the same worker as the previous task
3. Description matching — The Bee matches your request against worker descriptions
4. Fallback — If no worker matches, the Bee will suggest creating one

Direct Task Assignment

You can bypass the Bee's routing and assign a task directly to a specific worker using the CLI. This is useful for automation scripts and worker-to-worker delegation (e.g., a worker dispatching follow-up work to another worker from within its own task).

openbee ctl task create --message-id <id> --worker-id <id> --instruction <text> --type <type> [flags]

First, find the target worker's ID:

openbee ctl worker list

Then create the task. All three task types are supported:

Immediate — executes as soon as the worker is available:

openbee ctl task create \
  --message-id "msg-abc123" \
  --worker-id "worker-uuid" \
  --instruction "Analyze the latest deployment logs and report any errors" \
  --type immediate

Countdown — executes at a specific time (--scheduled-at must be at least 5 seconds in the future, in Unix milliseconds):

openbee ctl task create \
  --message-id "msg-abc123" \
  --worker-id "worker-uuid" \
  --instruction "Send the end-of-day summary report" \
  --type countdown \
  --scheduled-at 1735660800000

Scheduled — executes on a recurring cron schedule (5-field format: minute hour day month weekday):

openbee ctl task create \
  --message-id "msg-abc123" \
  --worker-id "worker-uuid" \
  --instruction "Check system health and alert if any service is down" \
  --type scheduled \
  --cron "0 * * * *"

If the cron expression is invalid, the task is created with status cancelled and a reason explaining the parse error. See the CLI Reference for the full flag reference.

Querying Tasks

Ask the Bee about task status through conversation:

"Show me all pending tasks"

"What tasks are running right now?"

"List scheduled tasks for Assistant"

Cancelling Tasks

Ask the Bee to cancel a task:

"Cancel the daily report task"

"Stop the recurring issue check"

Task Lifecycle

pending → running → completed
                  → failed
pending → cancelled

Scheduled (cron) tasks automatically re-schedule after each execution.