A Fresh Mint Each Occurrence

Cron fires an action. It runs the same anonymous function on a timer, and when the tick is done there is nothing left behind — no id, no record, no thing to retry. EchoMQ.Repeat refuses that shape. It registers a recurrence, and when an occurrence comes due it mints a fresh branded JOB — a new id, a new attempts counter, a new lease. The occurrence is not a function fired; it is a job created, with everything a job has: a name to track it, a retry policy to recover it, a place in metrics to see it.

That single decision — mint, do not re-fire — is what makes recurring work first-class. Two occurrences of the same schedule share nothing but the rule that spawned them, so a Tuesday run that fails does not poison Wednesday's, and an occurrence that overruns does not collide with the next. The schedule itself is a visibility fence over a scored set: entries hidden until their run-at, then promoted to ready by a supervised pump, EchoMQ.Pump, on the server's clock — so "due" is a fact the bus decides, never a caller's wall clock.

The difference between firing and minting is the difference between a tick and a record. A cron tick has no identity, so it cannot be tracked, retried, or reasoned about after the fact: if it fails, the failure is a log line at best. A minted occurrence is a job, so everything the bus does for jobs, it does for it — the attempts counter drives retry with backoff, the lease protects it under a claim, and it appears in metrics and, on death, in the morgue. Recurring work stops being a special case and becomes ordinary work that happens to arrive on a schedule.

The subtlety the scheduler has to get right is once, exactly, per occurrence — the Pump must promote a given occurrence a single time, not zero times and not twice. It does this by making the schedule set a scored, server-clock-gated fence: an entry is due when the server's TIME passes its score, and the promote step moves it atomically, so a fresh mint appears for each occurrence and no more. The recurrence is the rule; the mint is the instance; and because the instance is a full branded job, the whole lifecycle of the platform — claim, retry, metrics, archive — is available to work that used to be a disappearing tick.

The occurrence rule — a recurrence mints a fresh branded job each time it comes due, so every occurrence has its own id, attempts, and lease. Cron fires an anonymous tick with nothing to track; EchoMQ.Repeat creates a first-class job that the Pump promotes on the server's clock — a failed occurrence retries itself and never poisons the next.