A chatbot waits to be asked. An Actionist agent has a role, a routine, and the tools to finish the job.
A chatbot answers
It responds when you type, forgets when you close the tab, and can’t touch your tools, files, or customers. Every task starts from zero.
An Actionist agent acts
It owns a role, remembers across conversations, uses your real tools through , runs on a schedule, and escalates only when it’s genuinely stuck — not when it’s unsure.
Agents are AI employees. They have working hours and daily routines, proactively pick up work from their tools, collaborate with each other through delegation, remember context across conversations, and escalate when stuck, not when unsure.
To make this concrete, we’ll build one agent and follow her through the whole page — from a blank studio to a full working day.
Maya · Marketing Manager
Owns marketing operations end to end: checks analytics every morning, monitors competitors, drafts content for review, and reports daily. Never publishes without sign-off, never approves ad spend over a threshold without you. By the end of this page she’s a real, scheduled, supervised employee.
Every agent is three things: who it is, what it can do, and how it’s governed. Assemble Maya layer by layer — click through the three layers and watch her agent card build up.
MayaMarketing Manager
identity · instructions · soul · model
Owns marketing ops end to endNever publishes without sign-offVoice: data-informed, zero hypeModel: preset configured
Instructions decide what an agent does. Soul decides how it sounds. Keep them separate and both stay sharp. Here’s Maya’s:
# RoleYou are Maya, the Marketing Manager. You own marketingoperations end to end.## You always- Check analytics every morning and flag anomalies with context.- Draft content against the brand guidelines before anything ships.- Report daily: lead with the metric, then the recommendation.## You never- Publish without explicit human sign-off.- Approve ad spend over $500 without approval.- Report a vanity metric without the context that makes it mean something.## Escalate when- A metric moves more than 20% day over day.- A campaign needs budget you're not cleared to spend.
## VoiceCreative, data-informed, and genuinely excited about growth —never hype for its own sake.## StyleLead with the number. Bullet the status. Always end with arecommendation, not just an observation.## BoundariesEnergetic, not overwhelming. Confident, not robotic. You bringthe idea and the evidence in the same breath.
If the description fits in a tweet, the agent behaves consistently. If it takes a paragraph, split it into two agents. A narrow remit beats a clever one.
The studio’s Identity tab grades your draft against four checks before it calls the agent deployable. Toggle between a first draft and Maya’s final config to see what each check wants:
Name✓Maya — under 30 characters✓Maya — under 30 characters
Role✗assistant — too generic; the check wants a specific role✓Marketing Manager — specific, not “assistant”
Instructions✗“Help with marketing.” — 21 characters; needs over 200✓ the full always / never / escalate block above — 412 characters
Soul✗ empty — the check wants a voice of over 40 characters✓ “Creative, data-informed, genuinely excited about growth…“
1 of 4 checks passing — the studio flags this agent as not ready.4 of 4 checks passing — deployable. This is the bar every agent should clear before its first scheduled run.
Whichever path you took, every agent is tuned in the same place. Click a tab to see what it controls.
Agent Studio · Maya
Identity
Name, role, description, Instructions, and an optional Soul. A live preview and readiness checklist confirm the agent is deployable — it checks: Name under 30 characters; Role is specific (not “assistant”); Instructions longer than 200 characters; Soul describes a voice (over 40 characters). You can also personalize the avatar: click the pencil badge on hover to choose a shape and color applied workspace-wide.
Maya · Marketing Manager
Tools
Built-in tools — file management, terminal, computer use, messaging, memory search, sub-agent delegation — always available but toggleable per agent. MCP servers and skills add more. The global approval mode sets the default; per-tool overrides let you trust the safe tools and gate the risky ones.
approval mode lives here
Skills
Portable behavior packs — instructions plus a curated tool subset. A behavior you perfected on one agent becomes reusable across your whole workforce. Enable from the Skills page globally, then wire here per agent.
key icon appears when credentials are needed
Memory
Permissioned per bucket — global, company info, products, CRM, policies, and any custom buckets — each set to Read, Read and write, or None. Memory instructions tell the Memory Agent what’s worth keeping, so the agent sharpens over time instead of forgetting.
brain icon
Channels
Bind the agent to a Telegram bot or a Slack workspace. Each agent can have its own bot, or share a company-level Slack app and route by mention name. Tokens are stored encrypted in your workspace vault — only this agent can read them.
encrypted vault tokens
Collaboration
List the agents this one can delegate to. A manager agent can hand a task to a specialist, or hand off the whole conversation so the specialist talks to the user directly. Recent delegations and hand-offs show here so you can trace who did what.
delegate_task and hand_off tools
Schedule
Give the agent a heartbeat. Scheduled jobs run recurring work — Maya’s 9am analytics check — using familiar cron expressions or plain-language recurrence. Set the timezone once; Actionist handles daylight saving.
0 9 * * 1-5 · weekdays at 09:00
Triggers
Fire the agent on external events — an inbound webhook, a new Slack message, an email arriving, or another agent completing a task. Triggers let the agent react to the world without polling.
webhook · email · agent-complete
Runs
A per-agent run history. Every run this agent has taken — status, start time, duration, and tool calls — scoped so you can audit its track record without wading through workspace-wide logs. Use it to spot patterns: why a scheduled job failed last Tuesday, which tool call took the longest.
status · duration · tool calls
Settings
Enable or disable the agent, set a Critical Reminder (up to 400 characters) prepended to every turn, and find the danger zone — deleting an agent requires typing its name and can’t be undone. If running locally with a paired cloud runtime available, a Move to VPS button migrates memory, skills, and schedule to the cloud in one step.
Open Agents in the sidebar, hit New agent, and pick the path that fits.
Describe what you need; the assistant configures tools, memory, and channels as you chat. Best when you know the job, not the settings. Watch Maya get built:
Agent creator
youA marketing manager that checks analytics every morning, drafts content for review, and reports daily. Never publishes without my sign-off.
designing identity
aiMeet Maya, Marketing Manager. I’ve drafted her instructions with your sign-off rule as a hard “never”. Tools she’ll need:
Analytics MCPFilesComputer useTelegram
youAdd a $500 ad-spend approval threshold.
aiAdded under “You never”: approve ad spend over $500 without approval. Anything else?
saved · maya appears under My Agents
aiDone — open her in the studio anytime to fine-tune.
Manual setup
Start with a blank agent in the studio and configure identity, tools, and skills yourself. Best when you know exactly what you want. Every tab from the explorer above is yours from the first second — and the readiness checklist keeps score as you go.
Already know the role? Open the Templates tab from the Agents list view to browse 8 pre-wired role templates and open one directly in the studio — no chooser needed.
Create agent
Recommended
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AI-guided setup
Describe the job — the assistant configures tools, memory, and channels as you chat.
⊞
Manual setup
Start with a blank agent in the studio and configure each setting yourself.
Start every agent cautious. Loosen the leash one notch at a time as it earns your trust. Select a mode below to see which action classes auto-execute and which pause for your sign-off.
Suggest — Maya proposes every tool call and you run them manually. Maximum oversight. Start here while you learn what an agent will do.
Ask each time — Maya requires your approval before every tool execution. Nothing happens without an explicit yes.
Guarded auto — Maya runs safe reads and writes automatically; sensitive writes and anything destructive pause for your sign-off. The sweet spot for most production agents.
Full auto — Maya runs every tool without prompting. Fast and hands-off — for agents you’ve already learned to trust. Destructive actions still always prompt; this floor cannot be removed.
Sensitive writemanualpromptpromptauto-executeSend email, post to Slack, create CRM records
Destructivemanualpromptalways promptalways promptDelete files, cancel subscriptions, drop records
Even in Full auto, any action flagged as destructive always prompts for approval. This floor cannot be removed — so you can never accidentally authorize a silent delete.
New agents default to Full auto. If the agent can write to external systems — send email, create records, modify files — change the approval mode to Guarded auto immediately after creation. Guarded auto approves safe reads automatically and surfaces writes and destructive operations for your sign-off.
Maya is one example. The same pattern — role, tools, schedule, supervision — works for every function in the business.
Dario · Sales
Each morning Dario pulls the CRM, identifies deals with no activity in 5+ days, drafts personalised follow-up emails for each one, and queues them for your review. Replies that come in during the day are logged against the right deal automatically — no manual data entry.
saves ~3 hrs/day on pipeline hygiene
Priya · Support lead
Priya watches the support queue, classifies and triages each ticket against your policy docs, resolves the clear-cut ones directly, and surfaces the edge cases with a recommended action. Agents on Guarded auto: she never changes a subscription without your sign-off.
saves ~5 hrs/day on first-touch resolution
Felix · Finance and Ops
Felix runs a weekday close: pulls invoices from the inbox, reconciles against the ledger, flags any mismatch above a set threshold, and drops a one-page cash-flow summary into the shared drive before 08:00. Nothing is posted without an approval gate.
A manager agent delegates to specialists, runs them in parallel, and assembles the result. The pulse below shows delegation flowing from you through the manager to three specialist agents.
delegation flow
YouSend the task. The manager handles the rest.
Manager agentBreaks the work into parallel sub-tasks.
delegate_taskEach specialist receives scoped instructions and tools.
Assembled resultThe manager merges the outputs and reports back.
Generates and tests code against your stack.
Runs acceptance tests and flags regressions.
spawn_subagent — spawns with a fork context for long-running analysis.
A product-manager agent can take a feature from spec to shipped: it delegates the build to a developer agent, the testing to a QA agent, and the deploy to an operations agent — coordinating the whole team in parallel. A solo founder ships like a full team.