Skip to main content

Autonomous Operation (24/7)

Most AI builders generate a site once and stop. You get code, and then you're on your own — to write the content, keep it fresh, fix what breaks, market it, and grow it. Ever Works keeps going. Once you've pointed it at a Mission or shipped a Work, the platform's Agents and background workers keep researching, writing, building, deploying, and improving — on a schedule, not just when you prompt.

This is the difference between "here's your code, figure out the rest" and "here's your working business that keeps getting better." It's also the half of the product that the one-shot builders don't have.

What "keeps going" actually means​

It keeps……by
Adding contentScheduled generation writes new blog posts, finds and adds new directory items, refreshes stale entries.
Generating ideasA running Mission keeps proposing new Ideas that ladder up to your goal.
Improving the buildAgents open work on the code and content of a Work — fixes, new pages, new sections.
ResearchingAgents gather findings into the Knowledge Base so future runs are smarter.
Maintaining qualityScheduled updates re-run the pipeline; community PRs and item-source validation keep data accurate.
DeployingEvery change is committed to Git and redeployed to your target automatically.

The mechanisms​

Autonomy isn't one feature — it's several, working together:

  • Scheduled Updates — re-run a Work's generation pipeline on a cadence (daily, weekly, your choice) to keep content current.
  • Agent heartbeats — each Agent wakes on its own cron, decides the single most useful next action, and takes it: create a task, advance one, write to the KB, or observe.
  • Scheduled Missions — a Mission can tick on a cadence, generating fresh Ideas each time as the world changes.
  • Auto-build — turn it on and accepted Ideas become Works without you clicking anything.
  • Background workers — the Workers layer runs all of this reliably in the background, in parallel, with retries.
  • Community PR processing — incoming contributions are triaged and merged into your data automatically.
Before any of this runs — three gates

Autonomy is real, but none of it is on by default. Three things stand between a new account and the loop above — the first refuses loudly, the second can answer success while doing nothing at all:

  1. The Work agent is off until you switch it on. Enable Work agent on /settings/work-agent is unchecked on every new account, and it gates both build paths — the Build button on an Idea and a Mission's auto-build alike. While it is off the API answers 400 "Work agent is disabled.", and a Mission tick queues Ideas that never become Works without telling you.
  2. The Idea → Work build executor is operator-gated. EVER_WORKS_IDEA_BUILD_EXECUTOR_ENABLED defaults off and EVER_WORKS_IDEA_BUILD_EXECUTOR_DRY_RUN defaults on, so Build can answer success while nothing executes. That flag is yours if you self-host; on managed hosting it is the platform operator's.
  3. The first deploy is a human action. No code path publishes a freshly generated Work on its own — you deploy it once from the Work's Deploy tab. Scheduled Updates keep the site fresh only after that first deploy.

Build a Site Fully Autonomously from a Template walks all three end to end — where each switch lives, what to set it to, and what the loop looks like when one of them is still off.

You stay in control​

Autonomy is opt-in and bounded:

  • Budgets at every level — per-Work, per-Idea, per-Mission, per-Agent, and account-wide caps, soft (alert) or hard (block). See Budgets & Usage.
  • Guardrails — max items per run, approval rules, outstanding-Ideas caps on Missions.
  • Pause / Resume — stop any Agent, Mission, or schedule instantly.
  • Auto-pause on failure — a worker that keeps erroring pauses itself rather than burning spend.
  • Full audit trail — every autonomous action emits activity-log entries and Git commits you can review and revert.

You own everything​

Because code and content both live in your Git repositories, autonomous operation never locks you in. Every blog post written overnight, every product added to a directory, every code change an Agent ships is a commit in a repo you own. Turn the platform off and your working business is still yours.

See also​