Getting started with custom agents

A custom agent is an agent you design, with its own prompt, personality, skills, knowledge base, and memory. You describe what you want, Obvious builds it, and you chat with it, hand work to it, and share it with your workspace. Work that repeats is one reason to build one, but not the only one: an agent can also be an ongoing presence, carrying what it learns from one conversation to the next.

What a custom agent is

A custom agent works from a prompt: the instructions that shape how it behaves. It can also carry skills, a knowledge base, and memory of its own. It can still do everything the standard agent does; what changes is who you're working with. Some agents are specialists tuned for one kind of work: a research analyst, a ticket triager, a weekly-report writer. Others are ongoing collaborators, like an assistant that remembers what it learns as it works.

Custom agents appear in the same picker as the built-in modes, listed by name, and anyone you share one with can use it the same way.

If what you want is guidance that applies only inside one project, not a whole agent, use Project Instructions instead.

Create your first agent

Custom agents are new and aren't available in every workspace yet. If you don't see them, your workspace doesn't have access yet.

Open the Custom Agents page.
Start a new agent and describe what you want its job to be: what it's for, what it should do, and how it should behave. You can attach files if it needs reference material.
Answer the clarifying questions. Obvious asks about the decisions that shape the agent. Pick a suggested answer or write your own.
Review what Obvious builds. The profile appears while Obvious builds it: the agent's name, avatar, instructions, and working style. Adjust anything that doesn't fit.
Save the agent.

Everything beyond the basics is optional: skills, templates, connectors, and memory. Open those sections from the review screen if you want to fine-tune, or change them later from the agent's page.

You can shape your agent's personality in setup, where it is an optional step, or on the agent's Personality tab. Both offer presets and sliders for formality, warmth, candor, response length, and conviction, plus communication habits the agent follows.

The build keeps running in the background, so you don't have to keep the page open while it finishes.

Test your agent in the preview

The moment you save, you can chat with your agent in a preview: a private sandbox, isolated from your real projects. Give it a real task and watch how it handles it. Obvious also suggests a few test scenarios tailored to the agent; pick one to try it.

When you change how the agent behaves, the preview starts fresh on its own, so you can test the new behavior cleanly. Cosmetic changes, like renaming the agent, keep the conversation.

A new agent is private: only you can see and use it. When it's ready, you can share it with your whole workspace, or with specific people and teams.

Each person you share with can either use the agent, running it in their own chats and tasks, or edit it, which also lets them change how it behaves.

Only the owner can change sharing.

Publish your agent's knowledge

Your custom agent can publish the knowledge it carries, and other agents can install it. The knowledge stays linked to the artifacts it came from, and installing it on another agent keeps that link.

Publish your agent to Explore

Sharing covers your workspace. Publishing goes further: people across Obvious can find your agent in Explore and install a copy into their own workspace.

On the Custom Agents page, open the menu on your agent's card and choose Publish to Explore. You land on the Publish tab for your agent, where you build the listing and publish it.

Build the listing. The Title is the listing name. The Summary is one line on what the agent does. The Description covers what it does, who it is for, and how it works. Pick the Category and Industry. Under What rides along, choose the parts of your agent that install with it: everything you tick is named on your listing and copied into the installer's workspace. Add up to three Example prompts: things someone could ask the agent. Then add Showcase images to give people a look at your agent in action. A preview beside the form shows the listing card.
Choose Save draft to keep working on the listing before you publish.
When the listing is ready, choose Publish agent. A window asks you to confirm, and if your agent carries instructions it was given, it also explains what installing does: the person gets a copy of how you set the agent up, what you told it to do and how to behave, in their own workspace. The listing itself never shows any of it. Select I understand this is copied to installers, and I have the right to share it. Add an optional note about what changed for your listing's Recent updates. Then choose Publish to go live.

When the agent is live, its card shows a Live badge. To change the listing later, choose Edit Explore listing from the same menu. To take the agent out of Explore, choose Remove from Explore. People who already installed it keep their copies, and you can publish it again, though its Explore link may change.

Finish onboarding

New agents start in an onboarding phase. While onboarding, anyone using the agent can rate its replies right in the chat: Helpful, Off, Too long, or Save this. You can see what's working and what isn't.

When you're happy with how it behaves, complete onboarding from the agent's page. The agent becomes active and the rating prompts go away. Onboarding never ends on its own. You finish it.

Use your agent

To work with your agent, open the mode selector at the bottom-right of the chat input. Custom agents appear below the built-in modes, Agent, Autobuild, and Draft, with agents you own under Your agents and agents shared with you under Shared with you. Select your agent by name to run your next message with it. You can switch back to a built-in mode at any point. Switching doesn't change what's already been sent. For the full picker overview, see Agent Modes.

You can also assign a task to your agent the same way you assign one to a person: it appears in the task picker alongside your teammates. For more about what agents can do, see the Custom agents FAQ.

Manage your agents

Open the Custom Agents page to see every agent you own and everything shared with you. From an agent's page you can edit its behavior, change sharing, set it as the workspace default, or archive it. Archiving removes the agent from the mode picker and your agent list, and keeps the conversations it has already had. Workspace admins can see every custom agent in the workspace, disable any of them, or delete one permanently.