Building Agents

This guide teaches you how to create agents that deliver real value and work reliably in your workflows. You'll learn the chat-first approach to building automations and how to iterate effectively.

Organizing Your Agents

Think of agents like tasks or jobs. Each agent has a specific thing to do. You can group related agents together in the sidebar to keep things organized.

For example, you might have a "Marketing" group with agents for generating weekly reports, analyzing campaign performance, and monitoring social media mentions. A "Sales" group might have agents for daily deal summaries, weekly revenue reports, and monthly pipeline analysis. Each agent handles one specific task.

Use drag and drop in the sidebar to organize agents into groups and reorder them however you like. This structure helps you find agents quickly, even as you build more of them.

Starting Simple

Start with the smallest version you can describe in a few sentences. Don't try to build everything at once. Begin with a focused, simple agent that does one thing well.

When creating your first agent, describe the simplest version that solves your problem. For example, instead of "Analyze all customer feedback and create a comprehensive report with sentiment analysis, categorization, and trend detection", start with "Create a document listing the last 10 customer feedback messages from Intercom". Once that works, you can add complexity step by step.

Building Iteratively

Take one step at a time and make your agents more complex gradually. Iterative development is the best way to build reliable automations.

After your first simple agent works, use the chat interface to add one feature at a time. For example, if you started with listing feedback messages, your next step might be "Add sentiment analysis to each message". Then "Group messages by sentiment". Then "Add a summary at the top". Each step builds on the previous one, making it easier to understand what changed and catch issues early.

Use chat to refine your agents incrementally. Ask questions like "What does this code do?" to understand changes, or request specific improvements like "Add error handling" or "Make the report include charts". Run the agent, review results, chat again to improve, and repeat until it does exactly what you need.

Testing Changes Safely

Before you make any updates that affect your systems, always start by having the agent create a document of the changes so you can review them first.

When your agent will modify data or make changes in external systems, test it carefully before running it at scale. Start by having it create a document showing what changes it would make, then review that document to ensure everything looks correct.

Test in real life by processing just one update first. Check that it works correctly in your system, then test with 5 updates, then 10, until you're confident it works in all edge cases. Only then should you run it at full scale or schedule it to run automatically.