Development tools now allow agent tasks to run on a fixed schedule, hourly, daily or weekly. What looks like a detail changes the operating logic fundamentally.
An agent started by hand has a person in front of it. That person knows the trigger and sees the result, because they were waiting for it. A scheduled run has neither. It works with the permissions from the last setup, with assumptions from the time it was created, and often without anyone actually reading the output as long as it looks plausible.
This distinction is not new. ERP systems have had it for decades as background processing, together with the discipline that goes with it: named owners per job, error handling, escalation on failure and regular review. Those building blocks transfer directly.
Four points have proven useful. Every run needs a business owner rather than a responsible department. Failure and a wrong result need separate alerting paths, because only failure announces itself. All scheduled runs belong in one shared overview as soon as several tools allow scheduling. And every schedule gets an expiry date that must be actively renewed.
The decisive difference from a classic script remains: a script aborts on unexpected input. An agent carries on.