The current situation for auto shutdown appears to be:

When you create a Coder Workspace, it will be scheduled to automatically shut down after the TTL set in the template has passed, or what the user has configured in the Workspace schedule. If Coder detects any activity (through SSH/Port forwarded connections?), and the Workspace would be shut down in under one hour, it will extend the shut down time to one hour.

Sometimes the "Stops at" information is not shown on a Workspace, and I'm not sure why, but when it is, you can only use it to reduce the time at which the Workspace is stopped, or increase it back up to the max TTL.

What I would really like to see is:

• Ability to increase the lifetime above the max TTL. This could be achieved by introducing a default TTL that is used when the Workspace is created, and users can increase it up to the max TTL.
• Ability to set a shutdown by date & time instead of by "+ hours".
• Allow setting a fixed time in the schedule at which the workspace will be shutdown (unless activity is detected or the lifetime was manually extended), similar to how we can currently specify startup times.

This would be great for AI research where the allocated resources are very expensive. Having a low "default TTL" ensures that we shut down the workspace sooner than later. Currently I wouldn't be able to set the max TTL below 48 hours to allow me to allow the workspace can actually live for this long (to complete scheduled trainings that might take >24h to complete), but this also means that unless I remember to shut down the workspace when I don't need it to run over night, it will just keep running.

Related side question: Is it possible to stop the Workspace from inside the workspace without requiring the user to run coder login from inside the Workspace first? This could enable to set up a Cron-job that would periodically check resource usage and stop the workspace based on that information.