Create a managed agent

A managed agent is a piece of work you describe once and stop doing yourself: summarize yesterday’s billing disputes, open a Jira issue for tickets that mention a chargeback, email a Monday digest to the leads. Write what you want in a sentence or two; Rulebase builds the steps.

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What you need

Access comes in three levels: Administrators have all three; no other role has any until granted in the Agents permission group under Settings > People > Roles. If there is no New button on Home > Agents, you do not have Manage: you can read agents and their runs but not build one.

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Describe the job

Open Home > Agents and click New. The dialog asks what you want the agent to do, and your answer decides most of what follows. Brief it like a new colleague: what to look at, when, what to do with what it finds, and where the output should go. A vague brief like “check disputes” gives the builder nothing to work with. Then click Create agent.

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Let the builder do the first draft

Creating an agent drops you on its Instructions view with your description already sent to the builder chat. The builder is an agent itself: it writes the instructions, then lays out the steps the agent will take: what triggers it, which tools it calls, and where a human needs to approve something. Correct it as it works, through the chat box at the bottom (Ask or edit this agent…). “Only weekdays,” “use the support queue, not sales,” “email finance too”: each message revises the agent in place. Instructions save themselves; there is no save button. Two tabs sit at the top of an agent:

• Instructions is the build view: the name, the description, what the agent is told to do, its triggers and tools, and the steps it will run.
• Workbench is where you talk to the agent and see what it has been doing.

Name the agent while you are here. Every new agent is called New agent. Click the title to rename it, and add a description underneath so the next person knows what it is for.

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Check the triggers

Triggers decide when the agent wakes up. Most agents want one of two: On a schedule: hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly, with a time and a timezone, plus specific weekdays for a weekly schedule or a date for a monthly one. The timezone matters: a “9am” digest built in one timezone lands mid-afternoon for a team in another. On something happening: a ticket created, updated, closed, or solved; a sales call ending; a Jira issue created or its status changing; a Slack message arriving; an email arriving; or a webhook from a system of your own. An agent can hold more than one trigger: “every weekday morning, and also whenever a high-priority dispute lands.” How you change a trigger depends on the agent. When the builder has laid out steps (as with a new agent), triggers come from those steps; change them in the chat (“make it Tuesdays,” “also run when a ticket is reopened”). Agents that run from instructions alone show a + next to Triggers for adding one by hand.

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Check the tools

Tools are what the agent is allowed to touch; nothing outside the list is available to it. They are grouped by what they do:

• Rulebase: Web search, and Workspace data, where you choose whether the agent may only read your Rulebase data or also write to it.
• Communication: Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Email. Email sends only to recipients you approve.
• Data: Snowflake, for querying your warehouse.
• Developer tools: Open API, for an API of your own with an OpenAPI schema and key, and MCP Server.
• Integrations: the help desks and platforms already connected to Rulebase.

Review the list: an agent that can write to your data and email anyone should have that access on purpose. As with triggers, a step-based agent’s tools follow from its steps, so “stop emailing finance, post it in #billing instead” is a chat message with no checkbox to toggle. Where a + is available, the tool panel can also connect a missing source on the spot instead of sending you to Settings > Connections. This creates a real, organization-wide connection that other agents and people can use too. For anything that reaches a customer, ask the builder for an approval step before that action: the agent pauses, the people you name get an email with a link, and the run continues only when someone approves. Ask for it by name. The builder will not always add one.

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Run it once before you trust it

Click Run. If the agent needs input to start, a Run agent dialog asks for it; otherwise it starts immediately. Then read what it did in the activity panel below the instructions. It lists recent runs; expanding one shows each step in order, which tools it called, what came back, and where it stopped. Hand anything unclear to the chat with Ask about this run. A first run that is nearly right is normal. Tell the builder what was off and run it again.

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Publish it

Until you publish, the agent is a draft: it runs when you click Run and at no other time. Publish turns it on, and the button afterwards shows its state: Editing a live agent does not change its behaviour until you publish again, so a running agent keeps working while you rework it. Clicking Live or Update opens Publish version, which lists every version with who published it and when. From a version’s ... menu, Restore brings that version’s setup back, undoing a change that made things worse. Unpublish stops the agent from running without deleting anything. Back on Home > Agents, the filter next to the search box splits the list into Published and Draft.

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Related

• Glossary
• Manage the agent roster
• Use Instruct
• Manage integrations