Working with agents
The Agents section is the workbench for Covia Agents: create an agent from a template, chat with it in sessions, watch what it does, and control its lifecycle. Every action here is an agent:* operation on the venue, so everything you do leaves the same audit trail a script would.
Creating an agent
Agents → Create builds an agent from a venue template (v/agents/templates/*): among them skilled (lean core with loadable skills), goaltree (hierarchical planner), worker, analyst, and minimal. You choose a name, an LLM provider and model, and a system prompt; the template supplies the default tools and skills. The venue needs an API key for your chosen provider, stored as a secret under the standard name (for example ANTHROPIC_API_KEY); the create flow detects which providers are ready.
Equivalent operation:
POST /api/v1/invoke
{ "operation": "v/ops/agent/create",
"input": { "agentId": "researcher", "template": "skilled",
"config": { "model": "claude-sonnet-5", "systemPrompt": "..." } } }
After creation, the tool & skill picker on the agent's configuration lets you browse the venue's operations and skills and attach or detach them; each change is an agent:update with its own job record.
SDK: venue.agents.create(...), then venue.agents.chat(...). See Creating Agents for the full configuration shape.
Chat and sessions
Agents → Chat is a two-pane workbench: your agents on the left, the conversation on the right. Each conversation is a session on the venue: sessions persist across restarts, can be renamed, and the transcript renders agent replies as markdown with tool calls grouped into collapsible turns, so you can see exactly which operations the agent invoked and what came back.
| In the app | Operation |
|---|---|
| Send a message | agent:chat (with sessionId after the first turn) |
| New chat | agent:chat without a session id; the venue mints one |
| Rename a session | agent:renameSession |
| Fire-and-forget note to the agent | agent:message |
| Hand the agent a task | agent:request |
Runtime state and control
The agent detail view shows what a status pill alone cannot: pending inbox messages waiting for the next cycle, the next scheduled wake time, tasks in flight, and the per-cycle timeline with the operations each run invoked and the tokens it consumed. From the toolbar you can trigger a run now (agent:trigger), suspend and resume (agent:suspend / agent:resume), and delete (agent:delete).
Agent statuses: SLEEPING (waiting for messages or a wake), RUNNING (in a cycle), SUSPENDED (will not run until resumed), TERMINATED.
Skills
Agents → Skills is the venue's skills library: every skill the venue ships plus any you have written into your workspace (w/skills), each readable in full. A skill is an ordinary content-addressed asset bundling instructions, context, and tools that an agent loads on demand, so the library doubles as a catalogue of what your agents can learn. The page reads through skills:manage, job-free.
To teach an agent a skill of your own, follow Teach an Agent a New Skill.