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

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.