Automation — overview

What this accomplishes

Automate recurring work in Miton: visual workflow builder, local scheduler, webhooks, run inspector, and presets. Overview and links to task guides.

Automation is where you build workflows for work you do more than once a week. You get a visual graph editor, a scheduler that runs on your machine, a loopback webhook receiver, and step-by-step run history with replay.

This page is the overview. Task guides below cover each tool. See also /for-power-users.

Current availability

This page documents behaviour verified in Miton development builds. Miton is still pre-release and is not publicly downloadable; invited beta users will receive a signed desktop build with automatic updates.

Before you start

• A Miton development build, an active project and Automation open.
• A connected model plus permission for every file, network or scheduled action in the workflow.

What Automation does

You can:

• Build workflows in a visual graph — triggers on the left, actions on the right, connections by dragging lines between nodes.
• Schedule runs with cron expressions on your machine — missed runs backfill; no per-trigger cloud fee.
• Receive webhooks on a loopback-only receiver with HMAC-SHA256 authentication at 127.0.0.1:7733 — no need to expose a public endpoint.
• Inspect every run at two levels — the run as a whole and each step inside it; replay any step in isolation.
• Dry-run against fixture data before touching live systems.
• Connect to the rest of Miton — write a document, update a canvas app, spawn a sub-agent, search code, save to memory.

How Automation fits with the other lenses

Miton shares one agent engine across Chat, Writer, Canvas, Code, and Automation:

• Code — code editor, search, sub-agents, per-turn rewind.
• Writer — rich-text editor, citations, export.
• Canvas — visual canvas, forms, local data.

They share memory, model routing, permissions, and undo. A workflow can draft in Writer or react to a form in Canvas.

Default tools

Automation exposes these as node types in the workflow graph:

• workflow.run / workflow.save / workflow.delete — run and manage workflows.
• read / write / bash / http / ai / mcp / subagent / data / notification — inputs, actions, and outputs.

You can add custom node types or disable built-in ones.

Workflow presets

Ten built-in presets you can fork:

Weekly brief, monthly report, RSS to doc, social media queue, GitHub issue triage, code review digest, status page scraper, lead enrichment, inbox triage, and meeting prep.

Pages in this section

• Visual workflow builder — graph, connections, per-node config.
• Local scheduler — cron, backfill, rate limits.
• Webhook receiver — loopback binding, HMAC auth, replay protection.
• Run inspector and replay — run history, per-step replay and retry.
• Dry-run mode — fixture data and safe iteration.
• Workflow presets — built-in presets and custom presets.
• Integration nodes — HTTP, RSS, email, file watcher, git event, approval gate.

Shared topics live in the Docs index. Engineering detail lives in ../../architecture/.

What success looks like

Automate recurring work in Miton: visual workflow builder, local scheduler, webhooks, run inspector, and presets. Overview and links to task guides. The result remains attached to the active project when you move to another workspace.

Common failures and recovery

• Inspect the failed run and the exact node output before replaying it.
• Confirm credentials, permissions and test fixtures belong to the active project.
• Use dry-run or step replay before starting the complete workflow again.

Related next action

Build a first graph in the Visual workflow builder.