Claude Code /Loop

 

What is the /loop command in Claude Code and how can you use it?

 

 

How do you use the /loop command

The /loop command is one tool in Claude that helps you schedule things see https://code.claude.com/docs/en/scheduled-tasks [1]

Lets give it a quick test

> /loop 1m Tell me the time in MST, EST, and UTC

 

 

What is this going to do?
It’s going to run this prompt every minute

 

It just keeps running every minute.

I can still interact with Claude while this is running

> What is the temperature in Tokyo please access web sites to get this info

Now while you are interacting with Claude

The loop command is syntactic sugar for a crontool built into Claude (which I will not go over here).  But simply put it will run a prompt or a skill on a schedule. 

You can still interact with Claude the /loop task you set run in the background.

To stop it you can give it a prompt to stop it like

>  stop the loop

 

The loop it not a perfect cron job.  It will not run at the set intervals… It will try to run when it should but if Claude is currently thinking and its due to run it will respond immediately after Claude is done thinking.

Now its important to know that even if the current loop is delayed it will not shift the loops.  So for example if you say 30m and you start it exactly at 1:00 PM.  It will run at 1:30 PM , 2:00 PM, 2:30PM etc.
And if at 1:30 PM it gets delayed by 5 min due to Claude thinking it will not push out the next loop to 2:05 PM it will still be 2:00 PM (unless Claude is thinking then too)

 

Looping with an end in mind

You can also tell it to loop until…

So I could run something like this.

> /loop 1m Tell me the time in MST, EST, and UTC for 5 times and each time tell me which iteration I am on

 

It ran 5 times and stopped.

Other ideas you could do…

 

> /loop 10m /review-pr 1234   > /loop 5m check deployment status   > /loop 2h give me a quick health report of the project: - Open PRs and their status - Failing CI jobs - Stale branches - Recent test failures

Also you do not have to put in a time.  You can let Claude figure out a good interval so

> /loop check the deploy

I ran this, as a test, with no timer set

> /loop 1m Tell me the time in MST, EST, and UTC

 

It thought about it and decided to set the interval to 60 seconds based on what I had done before.

Can I change the interval while its running?  Let me try

> Change the loop to 5 min

 

Looks like it worked, but it could not change it until after the next loop. 😊  Nice!

 

 

Get a list of active loops

If you want to know which loops are running just ask it

> List my active loops

 

Nice!

That is it for /loops a pretty useful basic tool.  However, this has gotten me thinking I need to research more about cron scheduling in Claude.

 

 

References

[1]       Automation Run prompts on a schedule
             https://code.claude.com/docs/en/scheduled-tasks
            Accessed 05/2026