It (Claude Code) does, I discovered it by accident recently, having never used daily routines before. Haven't touched Claude Desktop at all, outside of playing with it for 30 mins or so months ago.
TLDR: I used Claude Code to build a command that scrapes job postings from a few employers I am interested in (it is a bit more complicated than that, but that's the gist). At the end CC asked me "do you want me to re-run it daily?" I said yes, and it generated a daily routine and gave me a URL to my anthropic account page where I can see all my daily routines.
There, it says that I am currently using up 1 out of 15 "free" daily routines that come with my personal subscription, and I would have to pay extra if I want to have more than 15 active at a time (I assume by switching to per-token pricing for anything beyond 15, but not sure).
I also haven't touched routines, but I use cc to write automation tasks that will integrate a model when I need an inference layer. Which I also did before routines..
Have people actually been using routines effectively?
This is one of the first things I “fixed” with skills and hooks. I index every conversation in SQLite and have a skill which knows what to do when I ask it to search the index. I had to avoid the word memory because it’s too tied up in other parts of the context. It even indexes across my different machines. I set this up because I have terrible context discipline. I’ll go off on a tangent in one context and start planning and sometimes implementing something based on that thread which really deserves its own context. Afterward I can create the new context and move relevant bits to it, but I’d lose that initial starting conversation which inherently has more data than the summary in the new context.
I also use a few different related contexts. One where I’m building a game engine in zig and another talking about game ideas. There’s a lot of back and forth going on there which needs some shared context. I solve this with a combination of Claude.md references and that searchable session index.
Everything I do with scheduled tasks are just wired up with systemd and simple scripts. No LLM in the critical execution path. Again a skill tells CC how I manage those scheduled things so I just have to say something like “run this every day at midnight” and CC has reliably taken care of the rest.