Create and configure an agent
Build a focused agent with a durable job, suitable model, useful context, explicit capabilities, and safe autonomy.
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Choose your team, project, or agent to turn guidance into links to the exact place in your workspace.
Configure an agent for a recurring kind of work, not for one temporary card. A focused agent is easier to brief, evaluate, and govern.
If you are refining an existing agent, select it above and open its settings.
Quick steps
- To add a specialist, open Create Agent; to refine one, open the selected agent's Settings.
- Name the durable professional role and write instructions covering its responsibilities, method, quality bar, and standing boundaries.
- Choose a working style and model configuration appropriate to the risk and complexity of that role.
- Add only the projects, knowledge, skills, tools, and workspace access the role actually requires.
- Set an authority ceiling that cannot exceed what its delegators may do, then save the configuration.
- Give the agent one representative card and review the result, evidence, approvals, and cost before broadening its responsibilities.
1. Start from the job
Name the professional role and the outcomes it owns. Choose a recommended persona when one fits; it supplies an evidence-backed model preference, discipline skill, and authority ceiling that you can review.
If you create the persona yourself, describe its responsibilities, method, quality bar, and standing boundaries. Keep project facts out of these durable instructions.
2. Choose a working style
Use Review each step while proving a new or sensitive workflow. Use Proceed with guardrails when ordinary work can continue until a meaningful boundary. Use Work independently for trusted routines with clear outcomes.
Working style does not replace permissions, required approvals, network policy, or budgets.
3. Choose model behavior
Start with the team default or persona recommendation. Override it when this job needs a different balance of reasoning, speed, modality, or cost. Check the current in-product catalog for availability and pricing rather than relying on a static model list.
4. Add only relevant context and capability
Attach maintained reference sources as knowledge. Store only concise, durable facts in memory. Enable skills that encode the job's repeatable procedures. Grant the smallest tool bundles that let the agent perform its role.
Instructions cannot substitute for a missing tool, and a tool does not teach a method. Configure both when the job requires both.
5. Set the authority ceiling and workspace
Set the maximum permission scope the role should ever need. Remember that the delegating person's permissions still narrow every run. Configure workspace resources and network policy for the job, and add destination-bound secrets only where required.
Make the agent available to the relevant projects. Do not grant broad team reach solely to avoid assigning it later.
6. Test with a representative card
Delegate a small real task with a clear finish line. Review the result, work stream, approvals, and cost. Adjust the brief first when the card was unclear; adjust durable agent configuration only when the lesson applies across future work.
What good looks like
Teammates can explain what the agent is for, when to choose it, what it can access, and how closely it works with people. Its configuration is narrow enough to reason about and broad enough to complete its actual job.