What Are Automations?

Imagine you go to sleep, and when you wake up, your daily brief is waiting for you. The sales report that landed overnight has already been analyzed. A backup of your most important file was created the moment it changed. No one had to lift a finger.

That's what automations do. They are small, self-running workflows that live inside your mind and take care of the things you'd otherwise have to do manually, over and over.

How is this different from Zapier or N8N?

If you've used tools like Zapier, Make, or N8N, you know the drill: open a complex builder, drag boxes around, connect APIs, map fields, debug when something breaks. Those tools are powerful, but they require you to think like a programmer.

Synap takes a fundamentally different approach. You don't build automations — you describe them. Tell Claude what you want to happen, and it creates the automation for you. No visual builder, no boxes and arrows, no API configuration screens. Just a conversation.

Want a daily summary of your pending tasks when you open Synap each morning? Say that. Want to watch a folder for new CSV files and have them analyzed automatically? Say that too. Claude translates your intent into a working automation and installs it in your mind.

What can automations do?

Automations can combine several types of actions into a sequence:

• Ask Claude to analyze or generate content — Read files, summarize changes, draft reports, answer questions about your data
• Watch files for changes — Trigger automatically when a specific file or folder is updated
• Run on a schedule — Execute daily, weekly, every six hours, or on any custom schedule
• Run when you open Synap — Perfect for morning briefs or daily check-ins
• Fetch data from the web — Pull information from APIs and save the results
• Read, write, and copy files — Move data around your mind automatically
• Run custom scripts — Execute JavaScript for data transformation
• Send notifications — Alert you when something completes or needs attention

These actions can be chained together. For example, an automation might fetch data from an API, run a script to transform it, ask Claude to write a summary, save it to a file, and notify you — all without any manual intervention.

Where do automations live?

Automations live inside your mind, just like your notes, files, and plugins. They're stored in a system folder that Synap manages for you. This means:

• They travel with your mind. If you sync your mind to another device, your automations come with it.
• Each mind has its own automations. Your work mind might have business-focused automations, while your personal mind has different ones.
• Everything stays local. Your automations run on your machine. No cloud service is involved in the execution.

You don't need to understand the details

Behind the scenes, automations are defined in structured files that the engine reads and executes. But you never need to see or edit those files directly. Claude handles the creation, and the Synap interface lets you manage, enable, disable, and monitor them visually.

If you're curious about how things work under the hood, the superadmin documentation covers the technical details. But for everyday use, all you need to know is this: describe what you want, and Synap makes it happen.