Tasks

Agents aren't limited to live conversations. With Tasks, you can run an agent on a schedule, fire it from an external event, have it pause mid-run for a human to sign off, and review the full record of every run it has ever made.

The Agentic section of the dashboard — accessible from the left nav — is where you manage all of this.

What is a task?

A task is a reusable unit of work: a name, a prompt the agent follows, and optionally a set of agents, a schedule, or a webhook trigger attached to it. When a task fires, it produces a run — a timestamped record of what happened, which agents were involved, how many credits were used, and what the outcome was.

One task can fire many times. A "Nightly sales digest" task, for example, might fire every morning on a schedule, each fire producing its own run in the Activity log.

Creating a task

Go to Agentic > Tasks and click New task. You can create a task in two ways:

The AI wizard walks through six steps: create → requirements → add agents → set trigger → test run → publish. You can leave the wizard at any step and return to it later.

Plan

Tasks have an optional plan — a structured description of what the agents should do, in what order, and what success looks like. The AI wizard generates a plan automatically and asks you to approve it before the task can be enabled.

You can also write a plan manually from the task's detail page. A task without an approved plan can still be test-run, but cannot be enabled for live scheduled or webhook-triggered runs.

Trigger types

Every run has a trigger type that records how it was started:

Scheduled runs

Schedules fire a task automatically on a timetable you define. Go to Agentic > Schedules and click New schedule, or create one in the final step of the AI wizard.

See Scheduled runs for full details — cron syntax, timezone handling, retry settings, and limits.

Inbound webhook triggers

A webhook trigger gives a task a public URL that external systems can POST to — firing the task whenever something happens in your own infrastructure (a new Stripe payment, a GitHub PR, a nightly cron from your own server).

Creating a trigger

Go to Agentic > Triggers (or the Triggers tab on a task's detail page) and click New trigger.

When you save, Elaras shows the dispatch URL and a signing secret — copy the secret immediately, it is only shown once. If you lose it, rotate it from the trigger settings to generate a new one (the old one stops working).

Dispatching a trigger

Send a POST request to the dispatch URL with:

• A Content-Type: application/json body — any JSON object you want the agent to see
• An X-Elaras-Signature header containing an HMAC-SHA256 signature of the raw request body

The signature format is sha256=<hex>. Compute it by HMAC-signing the raw body bytes with your secret:

// Node.js
import crypto from 'crypto';

const secret  = process.env.ELARAS_TRIGGER_SECRET;
const body    = JSON.stringify({ event: 'payment.succeeded', amount: 9900 });
const sig     = 'sha256=' + crypto.createHmac('sha256', secret).update(body).digest('hex');

await fetch('https://app.elaras.ai/api/v1/dispatch/<slug>', {
  method:  'POST',
  headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json', 'X-Elaras-Signature': sig },
  body,
});
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# Python
import hmac, hashlib, json, requests, os

secret = os.environ['ELARAS_TRIGGER_SECRET'].encode()
body   = json.dumps({'event': 'payment.succeeded', 'amount': 9900})
sig    = 'sha256=' + hmac.new(secret, body.encode(), hashlib.sha256).hexdigest()

requests.post(
    'https://app.elaras.ai/api/v1/dispatch/<slug>',
    headers={'Content-Type': 'application/json', 'X-Elaras-Signature': sig},
    data=body,
)
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A successful dispatch returns 202 Accepted:

{
  "status": "accepted",
  "task_id": 1042
}
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Response codes

Idempotency

If your dispatch system might retry on failure (Stripe, GitHub, Slack, and most webhook providers all do), pass an Idempotency-Key header — a unique string for this event, up to 128 characters. Elaras will deduplicate: if the same key is received again within 24 hours, it returns 200 with the original task_id instead of firing again.

Idempotency-Key: evt_stripe_abc123def456
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Human approvals

Some actions are too high-stakes to run automatically — issuing a refund, sending a bulk email, making a booking that can't be cancelled. Approvals let you gate a flow state behind a human sign-off before the agent proceeds.

Adding an approval gate to a flow

In your flow definition, add an approval block to any state that requires sign-off:

{
  "states": {
    "confirm_refund": {
      "message": "I'm ready to issue the refund. This is waiting for admin approval.",
      "approval": {
        "required": true,
        "policy": "any_admin",
        "note_required": true,
        "expires_in_minutes": 1440
      },
      "transitions": {
        "approved": "refund_issued",
        "rejected": "refund_denied"
      }
    }
  }
}
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Reviewer policies

The review flow

When an agent reaches an approval-gated state:

1. The session pauses and the agent tells the visitor the action is awaiting sign-off
2. Elaras sends an email to eligible reviewers with a link to the pending approval
3. The reviewer opens Agentic > Approvals, reads the context, and clicks Approve or Reject (with a note if required)
4. On approve: the session resumes and advances to the approved transition target
5. On reject: the session routes to the rejected transition target (or exits the flow if none is defined)

Every approval request and resolution is recorded on the run's Activity log, so you have a complete audit trail.

Activity log

Agentic > Activity shows every run across all tasks and agents, in reverse chronological order.

Filter the list by:

• Status — queued, running, completed, failed, cancelled
• Trigger — scheduled, webhook, manual, conversational
• Agent — filter to a specific agent

Each row shows the agents involved, the run status, when it started, and how many credits it used. Click a row to open the run detail page — a full timeline of every step the agent took, including tool calls, sub-agent consults, skill results, and approval events.

Run statuses

Retrying a failed run

If a run fails and you want to try it again, open Agentic > Activity, find the failed run, and click Retry. This creates a new manual run against the same task and navigates you to the new run's detail page.

For automated retries on scheduled runs, configure the Retries setting on the schedule — see Scheduled runs.

Credits

Each run deducts credits from your balance based on the model and number of tokens used. Multi-step runs (with multiple agent calls or sub-agent consults) deduct credits for each step. Retries — whether automatic or manual — each deduct credits independently.

You can see the credit cost for any run in the Activity log under the Details column.

Plan limits

The number of tasks you can create depends on your plan: