AI Agent
An AI Agent in the Crafting system is a user-defined specification for conducting agentic conversations or autonomous loops. The specification defines the details of the environment that an AI agent can interact with, including:
- Execution environment, backed by sandboxes.
- Tools, including the built-in Crafting tools and external tools via MCP.
- Inter-agent collaboration (an agent team).
Essential Information
The following information is required from an AI Agent:
- Brief — a very short summary of what the agent will do.
- Details — short, but with enough information to let the system know how to use the agent; for example, what should be included in the prompt.
- Instructions — this becomes part of the system prompt when the agent starts to run.
Note: both Brief and Details are provided for the system that uses the agent, not for the agent itself. The Instructions, as part of the system prompt, are used by the agent itself.
Agentic Environment
The rest of the specification describes the actual environment the agent runs inside, including:
- Execution environment — if needed, a dedicated sandbox is created for the agent.
- Tools — the selection of MCP tools and the related tool call policies.
- Collaboration — the list of sub agents that can be spawned and work in parallel to get complex jobs done.
- Model — the LLM model configuration.
Execution Environment
An Execution Environment is not needed if the Instructions provide enough context and the tool selection gives sufficient interaction.
For more complicated situations, involving:
- large scale context, such as source code or complex documents;
- state persistence, where the artifacts generated or updated during execution need to be preserved and reused in future follow-ups;
- full featured operating system access, including access to external services that require specific configurations from an operating system;
an Execution Environment can be defined to create a dedicated sandbox from a template.
Tools
Tools are an important part of an agentic environment, and define the capability of an agent. The specification can select both built-in tools and external MCP tools.
The built-in system tools are a collection of tools that let the agent interact with the Crafting system, such as sandbox management.
External MCP tools can be added to the environment so that the agent is able to perform business-specific tasks.
Collaboration
When a job is complex and requires any of the following:
- context to be limited and focused, so the agent can perform better;
- parts of the job take time and can run in parallel;
an agent team can be used to perform more efficiently.
An AI Agent may include a number of sub agents, which automatically activates the capability of executing as a team. During the conversation, additional tools are injected to list sub agents and to spawn child conversations with sub agents in parallel. The output of the child conversations is propagated back to the parent agent conversation, and it is up to the parent agent to decide how to process that output. The parent agent may generate follow-up prompts to resume child conversations and expect further output.
Model
A particular model can be selected for the agent, as well as remapping the models that are implicitly used in the conversation. See LLM Config for how models and their purposes are configured at the org level.
Ownership and Sharing
An AI Agent can be defined by a user for personal use. Such an agent is only accessible by its owner.
As an org admin, a set of AI Agents can be defined and shared at the org level. These agents have no owner and can be accessed by all members in the org.
For more details about defining and sharing agents, refer to the Agent Build Guide.
See Also
- Build AI Agents — a walkthrough of defining an agent
- Agentic Sessions — the conversations an agent runs in
- Template — the source of an agent's execution environment
- MCP Servers — external tools available to agents