Dispatch your first agent

What you will build

By the end of this tutorial, you will have:

• A coder agent hired into your workspace
• An active conversation with the agent
• A pull request opened by the agent

Prerequisites: Your first workspace completed.

Step 1: Hire an agent

Your workspace has a CEO agent from the previous tutorial. Now let’s add a coder.

1. Navigate to Agents in the sidebar
2. Click Hire agent (or ask the CEO agent to hire one via chat)
3. Choose a role — select Coder
4. Configure the agent:
   • Name: something short and memorable, like “alice”
   • Model: pick from the detected adapter models (e.g. Claude Sonnet, GPT-4o)
   • Adapter: the CLI backend (e.g. Claude Code, Codex)
   • Skills: add relevant skills like “flutter”, “dart”, “rest-api”
   • Effort: set to high for complex tasks, medium for typical work
5. Click Hire

The agent is registered in your workspace and appears in the agent list.

Step 2: Start a conversation

1. Navigate to Messaging in the sidebar

2. Start a new DM with your agent (or type @alice in any channel)

3. Type a concrete task, for example:

   Add a /health endpoint to the Express server that returns { status: "ok", timestamp }.

4. Press Enter to send

The agent:

1. Receives the prompt (assembled from its role, persona, skills, and your message)
2. Provisions an isolated worktree from the linked repo
3. Launches in a sandbox with capability-gated access
4. Starts streaming its thinking and actions back to the channel

Step 3: Watch the agent work

As the agent runs, you see its activity in the channel:

• Thinking events — the agent’s reasoning (shown inline)
• Tool calls — file reads, writes, shell commands (logged)
• Sandbox events — capability violations, if any
• Text output — summaries, explanations, questions for you

The agent’s status indicator changes through: idle → running → idle (when done).

If the agent needs clarification, it may ask you a question inline — answer directly in the channel.

Step 4: Review the result

When the agent finishes:

1. It commits its changes on the isolated branch
2. Opens a pull request against the repo’s default branch
3. The PR appears in Pull requests in the sidebar

Open the PR to see the diff, review the changes, and merge.

For a full walkthrough of PR review, see Review your first pull request.

Recap

You hired a coder agent, gave it a task, watched it work in real time, and got a PR back. The agent ran in an isolated worktree and sandbox — your main checkout was never touched.

Next: Review your first pull request to learn the review workflow.

For more on agents: The agent model. For dispatch details: Agent dispatch lifecycle.