Concept
What is Trigger?
Also known as: event trigger
A trigger is the event or condition that starts an automated run — a schedule firing, a webhook arriving, a file landing, a label being applied — without anyone pressing a button.
Every automation needs a starting gun. Triggers come in three broad shapes: time-based (every weekday at 8am), event-based (a webhook arrives when a payment succeeds), and polling (check the inbox every minute and start if something new looks like an invoice). The choice has consequences. Event triggers are instant but only exist if the source system offers them; polling works anywhere but adds latency and burns rate limit. Schedules are the simplest, and the reason most real-time automations are actually a minute late.
Triggers are also the point where untrusted input enters the system, and that's worth naming. The email that fires an agent was written by someone else; so was the issue comment, the form submission, the calendar invite. Treating trigger payloads as data rather than instructions is the first defence against prompt injection. In Velaris, what a triggered run can then do is bounded the same way an interactive one is: scoped credentials for that run, and destructive-tier actions still waiting on a human.