When something changes, the right thing happens.

No. Your agent handles conversations — reading intent and answering from your catalog — and you never script that. Rules handle the record behind the conversation: the predictable housekeeping, like ‘when a contact is tagged vip, subscribe them to the vip sequence.’ You are not drawing a conversation; you are setting one ‘when this, do that’ rule that runs on every contact, once each.

No, and there are guards for exactly that. A rule fires once per contact by default, so it can't repeat. A 30-second throttle collapses a burst of updates on the same contact into a single firing. And a rule's own actions never trigger other rules, so rules can't chain into a loop. HyperDM also records a firing before it acts — so if an action fails halfway, it under-delivers instead of messaging twice. Need one to run every time? Turn off once-per-contact for that rule and the throttle still protects you.

Triggers: a new contact, a tag added or removed, a custom field changed, or a date field like a renewal or a birthday. Actions: add or remove a tag, set a field, add to or subtract from a number field, subscribe or unsubscribe a sequence, start a flow, or notify you — a note on the contact's thread in your shared inbox, not an email or a text. You can stack several actions on one rule, and they run in order.

Date rules run on a once-a-day sweep in UTC. Point one at any date field you store — a renewal, a trial end, a birthday — and set it to fire on the day, or a set number of days before or after, say three days before a renewal. Mark it yearly and it fires once each year on that month and day. It's a daily check, so it's the right tool for reminders and follow-ups, not to-the-minute timing.