Nobody decides to let a relationship go cold. It happens by default: the former manager you meant to congratulate, the customer champion who changed jobs, the investor you only ping when you need something. Sales teams buy CRMs with "cadence" features for this; everyone else sets reminders — ping Dana in 3 weeks — and accumulates a graveyard of snoozed notifications, each one a tiny judgment made weeks ago by a person who couldn't see the whole board.
That reminder graveyard is a scheduling architecture, and it's the wrong one. Per-contact timers encode a decision at set-time ("3 weeks feels right") that should be made at wake-time, against everyone else competing for today's attention.
crm-touch-cadence inverts it. This is decay scoring at wake: the schedule holds exactly one recurring intent — a daily wake — and zero per-contact bookkeeping. Each morning the agent recomputes the whole leaderboard from first principles:
"Decay score = days since last_touch multiplied by importance. An empty last_touch counts as 90 days."
Time does the accumulating on its own; the wake just reads the clock. Nothing is ever booked per person, so nothing per person can go stale, double-fire, or need cancelling when you happen to grab coffee with Dana early. Contrast this with the repo's cert-expiry-sentinel, which books precise per-item instants — the right pattern when deadlines are hard. Relationships have no deadlines, only drift, and drift wants a ranking, not an alarm.
Three people, openers included, or silence
The daily cadence wake in agent.js picks the top three eligible contacts with a score of at least 30 and drafts each an opener — "2 or 3 sentences in the voice of a busy friend, grounded in the relationship field," with an explicit ban on inventing shared history. The three go out in one send_digest call (a stub — wire it to email or a Slack DM), and last_suggested is stamped so nobody gets re-suggested within 7 days. Suggestion fatigue is handled in state, not hope.
Two restraint rules do the most work. The threshold means a well-tended network produces silence — "If nobody clears the bar, send nothing" — and a quiet day still re-books tomorrow, because chains that skip boring days die on them. And the model runs once a day under maxSteps: 16, maxCost: 0.4, inside a perDayCents: 100 budget: the only LLM spend is the drafting, which is the only part that needs judgment.
The free half of the loop
Everything that isn't judgment is zero-LLM primitives. Building the network:
await agent.db.sql`INSERT INTO contacts (name, email, relationship, importance, ...)
... ON CONFLICT(name) DO UPDATE ...`;
Closing the loop when you actually reach out:
agent.task("touched", async (args) => {
...
await agent.db.sql`UPDATE contacts SET last_touch = ${new Date().toISOString()} WHERE name = ${name}`;
touched is the habit that makes the whole system honest — one free call and Dana's decay clock resets to zero. coldest gives you the live leaderboard as a pure SQL read (the decay formula translated into julianday arithmetic), zero tokens, any time.
The chain arms and disarms by the repo convention: start clears the cadence_stopped flag and runs one pass, which books tomorrow; stop is a zero-LLM flag flip that tomorrow's wake reads and obeys. The smoke task is add-contact — ingest never starts an infinite chain.
Deploy it
git clone https://github.com/oncell/oncell-cookbook && cd oncell-cookbook
cp .env.example .env # add your ONCELL_API_KEY
npm run deploy crm-touch-cadence
Load your people (zero tokens):
curl -X POST https://api.oncell.ai/api/v1/agents/crm-touch-cadence/add-contact \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $ONCELL_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"name": "Dana Reyes", "email": "dana@northwind.example", "relationship": "former manager, now CFO at Northwind", "importance": 3}'
Arm it once — curl -X POST .../start -d '{}' — then each morning brings at most three names, each with a why-now and an opener you can send after thirty seconds of editing. Reach out, call touched, and watch the leaderboard reshuffle.
What you didn't have to build
A reminder system and its graveyard of snoozes. Per-contact timer jobs with cancellation logic. A cron host for the morning run. Fatigue tracking. A CRM subscription for what is, underneath, one table, one formula, and one daily wake.
You wrote a decay formula and a taste rule for openers. The runtime does mornings; time does the scoring.