You want a Claude job to run every few hours on your Mac, not in the cloud. A cloud routine cannot do it, because it never touches your machine. Here are the local options that can, why launchd beats cron for this, and a working LaunchAgent that pulls every one of my repos on a schedule.
Claude Code /loop reruns a prompt on an interval inside your session. It is perfect for babysitting a deploy or a test run, and wrong for anything that has to keep going while you are away. It also exposes a durable flag that, on version 2.1.185, quietly writes nothing to disk. Here is how to use it well.
Claude Code scheduled jobs come in three forms with very different guarantees: the in-session /loop, Desktop tasks, and Cloud routines. A missed run does not queue up a backlog. And despite a common belief, none of them creates a Windows Task Scheduler entry or a .bat file. Here is how each one actually behaves.