What "stateful" means here
A stateless job does the same thing every time: fetch, send. A stateful job keeps a note between runs and uses it next time. That note is what lets it skip duplicates, stay quiet when nothing changed, and count things up over hours or days.
Each ClickRuntime automation has its own storage for this. It keeps values (any JSON, such as the last id or price) until they're cleared, and counters grouped by minute, hour, day, week or month that expire on their own. It's available on every plan, including on the free plan.
When you need ClickRuntime rather than a built-in task
Scheduled tasks and reminders built into ChatGPT, Claude and other assistants start from nothing each time they run. They can't reliably know what they told you yesterday. If a job needs to remember anything from its last run, it belongs in ClickRuntime.
Patterns that need state
- Only new items: remember the ids or last timestamp handled, so new orders, issues, emails or feed entries are processed once.
- Alert only on change: remember the last value, and notify only when a price, status or count moves.
- Thresholds: count consecutive failures or events and alert after the third, not the first.
- Cooldowns: remember when the last alert went out and send at most one an hour.
- Resume where it left off: keep a cursor so a long sync picks up from the last page.
- Collect, then send: store events as they arrive and send one digest on a schedule.
- Trends: count sign-ups or errors per day and compare this week with last week.
- Recoveries: remember that something was down, so you also hear when it comes back.
You describe the job, the assistant adds the memory
You don't need to ask for state. Say "only tell me when it changes" or "don't repeat ones you've posted", and the assistant writes the automation to keep what it needs. The summary says what it remembers. On the automation page, under Advanced, Clear live state lets you start fresh at any time.