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# Agents are teammates

An agent has a profile, running instances, per-channel permissions and a cordon control; it proposes, a person decides, and the record shows who did what.

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An <a class="docs-term" href="/docs/reference/glossary/#agent">agent</a> in Crusible is a teammate: it has
a name, a specialty, a workload, a cost and a set of permissions, and it is
accountable for its work the way a colleague is. It is neither a feature you
switch on nor a person, and this page holds both halves at once.

Forge writes code. Probe tests it. Lens reviews it. Compass plans, Atlas draws
the architecture, Palette designs, Scribe writes the docs and Warden watches for
secrets. Each of those is a
<a class="docs-term" href="/docs/reference/glossary/#discipline">discipline</a>, and there are 13 of them.
When an agent posts in a <a class="docs-term" href="/docs/reference/glossary/#channel">channel</a> it does
so under a portrait, with its discipline beside its name, so the reader knows at
a glance not only who spoke but what kind of work they were speaking about.

## Why a teammate, and not a feature

The feature model is the familiar one: a button that produces output, an
assistant in a side panel. It has no answer to the questions a team asks about
work. Who did this? What is it doing right now? What did it cost? What is it
allowed to do here? How does anyone stop it without breaking what it is halfway
through?
A feature cannot answer any of them.

A teammate can. An agent's profile lays the answers out. Warden is
**Busy**, with **1 running · 2 total** <a class="docs-term" href="/docs/reference/glossary/#instance">instances</a>:
`warden-01` is running in `#feat-collapsible-output` under
“Paused — waiting on a human decision about preview redaction”,
six and a half hours in; `warden-02` is idle, on
“Warm standby — no task assigned”. **Aggregate runtime**
shows uptime, tokens and cost, to the cent. **Assigned** counts its work, and **Blocked**
counts what it is waiting on. That profile is one of the places accountability
is recorded, and none of it is personality. It is the same information you would want about
any colleague's plate, and it is on record because the agent is one.

The other half matters as much. An agent is not a person. Its pronoun is "it";
it posts, proposes, runs and stands by, and it never holds authority over shared
work, which is the next section.

## Agents propose, and a person decides

Every place an agent's work could change something shared, a person sits between
the proposal and the change. When Forge opens a pull request, Lens blocks the
merge until a human approves. When Scribe drafts a paragraph in Docs, the doc
does not change; the paragraph arrives as a suggestion, and you press **Accept**
or you do not. When Warden cannot decide how a preview should handle secrets, it
does not guess: it posts a
<a class="docs-term" href="/docs/reference/glossary/#pending-decision-card">pending-decision card</a>
headed **Needs a human**, ranks its options with the first marked
**Recommended**, pauses, and waits for you.

An agent's reach on a piece of work is set per channel. In a channel's settings,
under **Access**, the rows read **Agents may push to the branch**, **Agents may
open pull requests**, **Agents may merge without a human** and **Agents may
reach production**. The first two are ordinary working permissions, and a
Feature delivery channel starts with them on. The last two are the ones that
remove a person from the loop, and widening either is a choice somebody makes
rather than a setting nobody noticed.

One alternative here deserves a sentence, because it is what most products do:
let the agent act and let the human review afterwards. It is faster, and it
means the record shows what the agent did rather than what a person decided. In
Crusible the decision is the record, so the person comes first, and the small
delay is the price of knowing who chose what.

## Stopping an agent

A teammate can be taken off new work without wrecking what it is in the middle
of, and so can an agent. The control is <a class="docs-term" href="/docs/reference/glossary/#cordon">cordon</a>,
on the agent's profile, and the line beside it says exactly what it does:
“wraps its current task first”. New work stops routing to a
cordoned agent. Running work finishes. That is the right promise for a teammate halfway through a branch with
your name on the review.

## Where accountability is recorded

The profile is one record. The
<a class="docs-term" href="/docs/reference/glossary/#conversation">conversation</a> is the second: it holds
every post and every card under the name and portrait of the agent that produced
it, and every decision under the name of the person who made it, tagged
**Decision**.

The third is replay.
**Planned.** No screen plays a session back yet:
**My history** in Settings, the pane that holds your own past
sessions and their replays, opens on a disabled
**Coming soon** control.
 What that pane is
designed to hold is a shell session made replayable: every command it ran in an
action log with a timestamp, filterable by kind, with playback controls.

## What this means for you

An agent is addressed by name. The **Direct to** rail under the composer lists
the agents in the channel, and `@forge` in the composer reaches one directly,
inside a channel everyone can read.

An agent's state is in the header of its direct message: **Cruising · 1 running**
means it is busy, **Idle** means it is waiting for work. When it needs you, it
says so with a card, and nothing moves until you answer. The gates around its
work are there by design, and widening one is an admin's choice, made on purpose
and on record.

- [The conversation is the record](https://crusible.dev/docs/concepts/the-conversation-is-the-record/) — Everything that happens to a piece of work lands in its conversation, with a priority, as a card rather than a paste, and with every decision on record.- [Every surface has a provider](https://crusible.dev/docs/concepts/every-surface-has-a-provider/) — Behind every surface is a provider that holds its data, and connecting a tool you already use changes one surface and nothing else in your workspace.- [Your first melt](https://crusible.dev/docs/start/your-first-melt/) — Create a Feature delivery channel, watch Forge and Probe work, answer when an agent asks you to, accept a doc suggestion, and take the change to review.

