Creating Agents in the App

You don’t have to hand-write agent YAML. The Agents page gives you a Bolt-like builder flow: pick a template or start from scratch, fill in the agent’s identity and tools, and deploy. When you deploy, you choose where the agent lives: saved to the workspace only, or written to your repo as .dinoai/agents/<name>.yml through a pull request.

​

The Agents page

Open DinoAI Agent from the left navigation and select Agents. The list shows every agent available in the workspace, whether it was built here or defined as YAML under .dinoai/agents/ in your repo. Cards for repo-defined agents show the file path they come from. From this page you can:

• New agent: open the template gallery and builder.
• Chat (hover an agent card): start a new interactive session with that agent. Your first message starts the run; the agent clones the repository and works from there.
• Schedule (hover an agent card): jump straight to a new Bolt schedule with the Run DinoAI Background Agent command already added and the agent pre-selected, so you only need to describe the task. See Triggering from Bolt.

​

Pick a template or start from scratch

Clicking New agent opens the template gallery. Templates pre-fill the agent’s identity for you and are grouped by category (Reliability, Quality, Cost, Code review, Documentation, Analytics). They include ready-made starting points like bolt-pipeline-healer, incident-responder, freshness-watchdog, test-failure-analyst, warehouse-cost-optimizer, dbt-model-reviewer, docs-writer, and analytics-responder. Pick Start from scratch for a blank agent where you write the role, goal, and backstory exactly how you want.

​

The builder

The builder walks you through the same fields you would otherwise write in YAML. A checklist in the left rail tracks which sections still need attention.

​

Identity

• Name: becomes the filename under .dinoai/agents/ and how you invoke the agent from Bolt, the API, or chat.
• Role: who the agent is, in one line.
• Goal: what a successful run achieves.
• Backstory: context the agent carries into every run, such as conventions, what to be careful with, and who the work is for.

​

Model

Paradime picks the best model for each task automatically. Pinning a specific model per agent is coming soon.

​

Tools

Control which tools the agent may reach for:

• Allowed tools: only these, everything else is refused.
• Denied tools: everything the workspace allows, except these.
• Leave both lists empty and the agent inherits the workspace’s tool permissions.

See the Tools Reference for what each tool does.

​

Output (optional)

Pick a Slack channel the agent posts its results to. Leave it empty and the agent replies wherever it was invoked (the Bolt run log, the API session, or the chat).

​

Squad (optional)

Select other agents this one can delegate to. Each sub-agent runs in its own session and reports back. See Agent-to-Agent Delegation.

​

Deploy

Click Deploy and choose where the agent lives:

• Just here: the agent is saved to this workspace and is live straight away, with no file in your repo. You can deploy it as YAML later to put it under review.
• Open a pull request: Paradime commits .dinoai/agents/<name>.yml to a branch and opens a pull request against your default branch. The agent starts working once the change is merged, and from then on it is version-controlled alongside the rest of your project, exactly as if you had written the file by hand.
• Download the YAML (shown when GitHub isn’t connected): download the file and commit it to your repo yourself.

Choose Just here to iterate quickly, and the pull request route when you want the agent governed as code with review. Both kinds appear in the same agent list and are equally selectable everywhere agents can run, including the Bolt command picker.

​

Run the agent

Once the agent exists you can trigger it from any surface:

• Chat: hover the agent card and click Chat for an interactive session in the app.
• Bolt: hover the agent card and click Schedule, or add the Run DinoAI Background Agent command to any schedule. Runs natively, no API keys needed. See Triggering from Bolt.
• API, SDK, or CLI: for workflows you orchestrate yourself. See the API Reference.

Sessions from every surface land in the sessions list on the Agent page, labelled by source (Bolt, Slack, API, or chat). See Agent Sessions for following runs, transcripts, and continuing a chat.