How to Build Agents

Building effective AI agents is both an art and a science. This guide will teach you how to create agents that deliver real value and work reliably in your workflows.

Understanding Agents

Agents are specialized assistants with clear, focused purposes. They contain actions that perform specific tasks. Once configured and activated, agents work independently according to their schedules.

The Chat-First Approach

In UpdateMate, you don't write code—you chat with UpdateMate to create and refine actions. Describe what you want, UpdateMate generates code, iterate through chat to refine, then test and refine again. This iterative chat workflow makes it easy to build complex automations without writing code yourself.

Planning Your Agent

Start by clearly defining what you want your agent to accomplish. Good examples: "Monitor customer satisfaction metrics and alert on issues", "Generate weekly marketing performance reports", "Analyze support tickets and identify common problems". Avoid vague descriptions like "Do marketing stuff" or "Handle everything".

Determine what your agent should and shouldn't do: what data sources will it use, what outputs should it produce, how often should it run, and who needs to see the results.

Building Your Agent

Describe what you need—for example: "Weekly sales report generator" or "Customer feedback analyzer". UpdateMate automatically generates an appropriate name. You'll immediately create the first action using the chat interface. New agents start in paused state.

Use the chat interface to describe what you want. Good prompts: "Generate a weekly sales report from HubSpot showing total sales, new customers, and growth percentage", "Monitor Intercom conversations for negative sentiment and create a daily summary of issues". Avoid vague prompts like "Check sales" or "Look at data".

Be specific: mention the data source, what to analyze, and what output you want. Include context like date ranges, filters, or criteria. Describe the output format. Mention which secrets to use.

After UpdateMate generates the initial code, use chat to refine it. Ask questions like "What does this code do?" or request changes like "Add error handling" or "Make the report include charts". Run the action, review results, chat again to improve, and repeat until perfect.

Choose the right schedule: real-time monitoring (webhook triggers or minute/hourly schedules), daily summaries (once per day), weekly reports (specific day and time), or monthly reviews (start or end of month).

Link your data sources: add secrets (API keys), reference secrets in chat when describing actions, and test actions manually to ensure they can access the data.

Agent Architecture Patterns

Single-Purpose Agent: One agent, one clear purpose. Example: "Customer Satisfaction Monitor" with action "Track NPS scores and alert on drops". Use case: focused monitoring or reporting.

Multi-Action Agent: One agent, multiple related actions. Example: "Marketing Analytics" with actions for daily traffic report, weekly conversion analysis, and monthly performance summary. Use case: related tasks that belong together.

Pipeline Agent: Agent that processes data through stages. Example: "Customer Feedback Processor" with actions to collect feedback, analyze and categorize, and generate insights report. Use case: multi-step workflows.

Best Practices

Naming Conventions: Let UpdateMate name agents automatically. Use descriptive action names when chatting. Be consistent with naming patterns.

Organization: Group related actions under the same agent. Create separate agents for different types of work. Periodically audit your agents.

The Chat Workflow: Start simple, then refine through chat. Don't expect perfection on the first try. Ask questions to understand what the code does. Test frequently during development.

Performance: Start with basic actions and add complexity gradually. Run actions manually before scheduling. Check logs regularly. Don't run actions more frequently than necessary.

Error Handling: Review execution logs regularly. Use chat to fix errors when actions fail. Ask chat to add error handling if needed. Consider creating monitoring agents for critical workflows.

Common Patterns

Reporting Agents: Scheduled actions that query data and create documents. Example: weekly sales report, daily metrics summary. Chat prompt: "Generate a [frequency] report from [source] showing [metrics]".

Monitoring Agents: Frequent checks with alerts on thresholds. Example: customer satisfaction monitor, error rate tracker. Chat prompt: "Monitor [metric] from [source] and alert when [condition]".

Analysis Agents: Actions that transform data into insights. Example: customer feedback analyzer, trend detector. Chat prompt: "Analyze [data] from [source] and identify [insights]".

Troubleshooting

Agent Not Running: Check agent and action states (both must be active), verify schedules are configured correctly, review logs for errors, use chat to help diagnose.

Action Code Doesn't Work: Use chat to describe the problem and ask for a fix, verify API keys are set up correctly, review logs for error messages, keep chatting until it works.

Unexpected Results: Review your chat prompt to ensure it was clear, check logs to see what the action actually did, verify data sources are accessible, use chat to adjust the behavior.

Performance Issues: Don't run actions more often than needed, break complex actions into smaller ones, be aware of API rate limits, ask chat to optimize the code.

Can't Figure Out How to Do Something: Ask chat—the interface can help you figure out how to accomplish tasks. Describe the goal (what you want to achieve, not how to code it). Keep chatting until you get what you need.

Next Steps

Now that you know how to build agents, create your first agent with a simple, focused task, use chat effectively to describe what you want clearly, iterate to refine actions through conversation, explore examples for inspiration, and review logs to monitor execution.

Building effective agents takes practice, but with the chat-first approach, you'll be creating powerful automated workflows in no time. Remember: when in doubt, just chat with UpdateMate!