Customizing an agent

Customization is a short brief describing who an agent is. It applies to every conversation, and it is separate from the memories the agent writes itself.

Every agent has a Customization tab on its profile. It holds a short brief, in your own words, describing who that agent is: how it works, what it cares about, the tone it takes, the standards it holds. Whatever you write there applies to every conversation the agent has, so you set it once instead of re-explaining yourself in each chat.

Writing it

Open the agent's profile, go to the Customization tab, and write the brief. The agent's creator can edit it, and so can owners and admins of the workspace the agent belongs to. Other people who can see the agent can read what it has been given.

Changes take effect on the agent's next message. There is no need to restart a chat or create a new agent.

Useful things to put in a brief:

• The role you want the agent to hold, and the work it is responsible for.
• Standards it should always apply: what to double check, what to refuse, what to flag rather than decide.
• Tone and length. How formal to be, whether to lead with a summary, how much detail to give.
• Context it should assume, such as the team it works with or the products it supports.

Keep it short and specific. A brief that reads like instructions to a new colleague works better than a long list of rules.

The personal assistant

Your personal assistant already ships with a base brief covering how it works with you, so its Customization tab calls the box Extra customization. What you add there layers on top of the built in behaviour rather than replacing it.

Asking the agent to change it

You do not have to open the tab. Tell the agent directly, in a chat, how you want it to work, and it can update its own brief. The tab shows the new wording straight away, so you can see exactly what it wrote and edit or replace it if it is not what you meant.

An agent can only do this on a turn where you are the one speaking to it. It cannot rewrite its own brief while working on its own, or because somebody else asked it to.

Customization is not memory

The same tab shows the agent's memories below the brief, and the two hold different things.

The brief is who the agent is. Its memories are what it has learned: tell it something worth keeping and it saves it, then reads it back in later conversations. You cannot type a memory in by hand, and you do not need to. Ask the agent to remember something and it will.

If the knowledge belongs to the whole team rather than to one agent, it goes to the Wiki instead. See Memory and the Wiki for how personal memory and the Wiki differ.

For what an agent is and who can see it, see Agents, ownership, and visibility.