Agents, personas, and working styles
Configure agents as accountable teammates with a clear job, method, model, capabilities, and level of autonomy.
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Choose your team, project, or agent to turn guidance into links to the exact place in your workspace.
An agent in Delegate is a durable working identity. It combines a professional role with instructions, context, capabilities, a model configuration, and operating boundaries. The goal is not to make a universally capable bot; it is to make the right teammate predictable for a class of work.
Select an agent above to open its settings while you compare these ideas with its actual configuration.
The persona defines the job
A persona describes what the agent is responsible for and how it approaches the work. “Research assistant” is a label. A useful persona also says which sources to prefer, how to handle uncertainty, what evidence to return, and which decisions must remain with a person.
Recommended personas provide an evidence-backed starting point for common use cases. They pair a role with a suitable model preference, a discipline skill, and an authority ceiling. Model recommendations are dated because capabilities and availability change. The current configuration shown in the product is the source of truth.
Instructions have different lifetimes
Keep enduring professional behavior in the agent's instructions: its method, quality bar, communication style, and standing prohibitions. Put facts about a specific initiative in the project description, knowledge sources, wiki, or card.
This separation avoids agents accumulating stale project details in their identity. It also lets one well-configured agent work across multiple projects without losing its discipline.
Context and capabilities are explicit
Knowledge gives an agent indexed reference sources. Memory retains short facts that remain useful across runs. Skills provide repeatable methods. Tools let the agent actually inspect or change something. A workspace supplies an isolated computer for file, browser, and command work.
These parts are complementary. Giving an agent instructions to “check the calendar” does not give it a calendar tool. Giving it a tool does not teach it your scheduling rules. Good configuration supplies both the capability and the method, then limits them to the work the agent should perform.
Working style controls the review rhythm
Choose one of three working styles:
- Review each step for unfamiliar, sensitive, or highly supervised work.
- Proceed with guardrails for work that can continue until it meets a meaningful boundary.
- Work independently for trusted routines with a clear finish line.
The style changes when the agent seeks review; it does not override safety, permissions, approvals, or budgets.
Agents can collaborate without becoming opaque
An agent may delegate a bounded subtask to another available agent. Parent and sub-agent runs stay connected in the work stream, so the original card still shows how the result was produced. Use specialist agents when their distinct methods or tools improve the work; avoid adding agents merely to simulate an organization chart.