# Agents

Settings → Agents lists the agents you can work with in the Terminal, where shift + tab switches between them.

# Where agents come from

Source	What it means
Built-in	Agents every workspace has
Deployment	Agents from the platform or your company settings, read-only here
User	Agents you created or overrode, stored in your own settings

If your company settings name a default agent, new sessions start with it instead of build. The PHOENIQS template, for example, makes example-assistant the default.

# Modes

Mode	What it means
Primary	An agent you work with directly in the Terminal
Sub-agent	An agent that a primary agent hands a task to
Primary and sub-agent	Both

# Built-in agents

Agent	What it does
`build`	The default. Changes files and runs commands, within the permissions it is configured with.
`plan`	Read-only. Explores the code and plans the work before anything is changed.
`compaction`, `summary`, `title`	Helpers the agent uses behind the scenes, to condense long conversations and to write summaries and titles. You do not work with them directly.

# Creating and changing agents

New agent creates one of your own.
Override on a built-in or deployment agent creates your own copy of it, which then takes its place for you. Remove your copy to go back to the original.

When you create or edit an agent, you set:

Field	What it is
Name	How you select it
Description	When to use this agent. Primary agents read it to decide when to hand a task to a sub-agent.
Mode	Primary, sub-agent, or both
Model	The model it uses, if not the default
System prompt	Its instructions
Temperature and Top-p	How varied its answers are
Tools	Which tools it may use, one `tool: true` or `tool: false` per line
Colour	Its colour in the Terminal
Hidden	Leaves it out of the Terminal's agent list

Your agents are stored in your own settings and kept across restarts.

Terminal

../../terminal/

Company

../company/

ai coding phoeniqs ai build settings agents opencode