Write an instruction once, and Hamster runs it automatically whenever the right thing happens in your workspace.
Every product team has work that should happen every single time — summarise a new Brief so the team has shared context, check a completed Task against the Brief's acceptance criteria, flag when a Plan changes scope. Without automation, this relies on someone remembering to do it. Sometimes they do. Often they don't.
Routines take those recurring jobs off your team's plate. You write the instruction once, attach it to the events that should trigger it, and it runs without anyone thinking about it.
A Routine has two parts:
When a trigger fires, Hamster reads your instructions, gathers the full context of the triggering event, and executes. The output lands in the run history, and any changes it makes to Briefs, Tasks, or documents appear in the normal activity feed.
Open Routines from the workspace sidebar and select New Routine.
The editor has three tabs:
Instructions are plain-language prompts. Hamster receives the full context of the triggering event — the Brief content, the Task details, the Initiative it belongs to — so you can reference entities directly rather than describing them abstractly.
A few patterns that work:
When this brief is created, write a two-paragraph research summary based on
the description and add it to the brief as a context document.
When a task is marked complete, check that the task title and description
match the acceptance criteria in the parent brief. If they don't align,
post a note in the task thread with the specific discrepancy.
When this blueprint is updated, compare the new version against the previous
version and summarise what changed in three bullet points.
When an initiative status changes to "delivering", scan the attached briefs
for any tasks that are still in draft state and flag them in a comment on
the initiative.
When a brief is approved, write a one-paragraph summary of what was agreed
and the key decisions made, and attach it to the brief as a handover note.
When an initiative is marked at risk, review the attached briefs and list
the specific blockers or open questions that could be contributing.
Instructions can be as long as you need. Routines support full markdown, so you can include examples, formatting rules, or multi-step logic.
Use Test Run to check that your instructions produce the right output before attaching any triggers.
Select Test Run from the Routine modal, and Hamster executes what you've written in the editor right now — including any edits you haven't saved yet. You don't need to save before testing. Write a draft, run it, see what Hamster produces, adjust, and run again. Only save when you're happy.
The Result appears in the Runs tab. Each test-run entry shows the exact instructions that ran, so you can compare iterations side by side. Test runs are marked Test run in the run history and don't count toward the Last run column on the Routines list — your tests don't displace the record of the last real execution.
You can test at any point, with or without triggers configured.
The test-run button is disabled when:
When a trigger fires, Hamster executes your instructions using the same AI that runs your conversations. It has access to the full workspace context — Briefs, Tasks, documents, Initiatives — and can use the same tools available in chat: reading and writing Briefs, adding context documents, posting notes, and more.
Routine executions run in the background and don't appear in your Conversations. Each run gets its own isolated thread, so your chat history stays focused on your actual conversations.
Triggers are workspace lifecycle events. Add one or more from the Triggers tab. A single Routine can respond to multiple events — for example, both brief.created and brief.status_changed.
| Group | Events |
|---|---|
| Brief | Created, status changed, Plan generation started/completed/failed, review requested, alignment vote submitted, approved, updated, deleted, document added/removed, Task added/removed, member added/removed, comment added |
| Initiative | Created, state changed (shipped, blocked, archived), health changed (at risk, off track), updated, deleted, Brief added/removed, member added/removed, comment added |
| Blueprint | Created, updated, deleted, published, section added/removed |
| Task | Created, updated, status changed, assigned/unassigned, completed, deleted |
| Plan | Generated, updated |
Each trigger can be enabled or disabled individually — toggle the switch next to a trigger to pause it without removing the configuration.
A Routine's instructions can tell Hamster to post a message directly into a Brief's or Blueprint's chat thread — not just record output in the run history, but make it visible to your team in context.
This is useful when a Routine is watching one thing but its output belongs somewhere else. For example, a Routine that monitors Initiative status changes can post a summary of what changed directly into the Initiative's attached Briefs so the people working on them see it without going to the Routines page.
To use this in your instructions, describe what you want posted and where:
When the initiative status changes to "delivering", post a message to the
initiative's primary brief chat summarising what changed and listing any
tasks still in draft state.
Hamster finds the target thread, posts the message as an automated entry, and marks it so it's clear it came from a Routine rather than a team member.
When a Routine fires and is actively executing, a status indicator appears on the relevant thread entry point. This shows the Routine is in progress — you do not need to refresh or check the Runs tab to know it's working. The indicator clears when the run completes.
If a Routine fails, the run is logged with the error. You can open the run from the Runs tab to see what went wrong — the full input the Routine received and the error message are both visible.
If a Routine fails five times in a row, Hamster disables it automatically and marks it as "Disabled by system" in the Routines list. This prevents a misconfigured Routine from continuing to fire against events it cannot handle. To re-enable it, fix the instructions and toggle it back on from the Routine card.
Single failures do not disable a routine. The consecutive-failure threshold exists to catch Routines that are broken in a way that will keep failing, not to disable Routines that occasionally hit a transient error.
Every execution is logged. Open the Runs tab inside a Routine to see its history, or go to Routines → All Runs to see every execution across your workspace in one feed.
The feed updates in real time as runs complete. Use the Triggers filter on the All Runs feed to narrow down to specific event types.
Each run shows:
The instructions shown are what fired at that moment — not whatever the Routine currently says. If you edited the Routine after this run, the run history still reflects what actually executed. This matters when you're debugging: you can look at any run and know exactly what Hamster was working from.
Click any run to open the full thread view — the complete AI execution with tool calls, reasoning, and output, the same as any other Hamster conversation.
Creating, editing, and running Routines requires the Manage Routines permission. Members without this permission can view Routines and their run history, but can't create, edit, or trigger them.
Routines are account-level — they apply to your whole team workspace, not just the person who created them.