Agents, skills, and pulses

Agents are Pilea’s AI teammates. Every workspace ships with a default agent - Pilea, “The general-purpose Pilea assistant — writing, research, skill authoring, and everything in between” - and you can create more, each with its own personality and job. More specialised teammates are rolling out too.

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What makes up an agent

Each agent has:

• A name, description, and avatar with an accent color - so you can tell your teammates apart.
• A prompt - the persona and instructions that define how it behaves and what it focuses on.
• Delivery channels - Slack channels and/or email addresses where its output lands.

To create one, click New agent and pick From scratch - or take the lazier, smarter route: Open in chat with Pilea. Describe the teammate you want, and the default agent sets it up for you.

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Skills: reusable instructions

A skill is a reusable instruction set you attach to an agent - a recipe it can execute on demand. Write it once, and the agent runs it consistently every time.

User-invocable skills appear as /slash-commands in chat. Type / and pick the skill, and the agent runs it right there in the conversation.

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Pulses: skills on a schedule

A skill can have a Pulse - a schedule (say, weekly at a set time) that makes it run on its own. No one has to remember to ask; the work just shows up.

The default Pilea agent comes with one out of the box: a weekly product and feedback summary, delivered by email.

Each skill has a notification mode that controls what gets posted to Slack or email when a run completes:

Mode	What arrives
Silent	Nothing - the run happens quietly
Summary	A short digest of the result
Full	The complete output

💡 Tip: Start scheduled skills on summary. If a pulse consistently earns its place in your inbox, promote it to full; if you keep skimming past it, drop it to silent.

To see what’s coming up, check the Agents calendar - it visualizes all upcoming scheduled runs across your agents, so you know what’s about to land and when.

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Alert rules: agents that watch your metrics

Beyond schedules, alert rules let agents react to what’s happening in your data. A rule can watch metrics like mention count, feedback count, or a sentiment drop, and notify you via Slack or email when something moves.

ℹ️ Note: Pulses and alerts are complementary. A pulse says “tell me every Monday”; an alert says “tell me the moment sentiment dips.” Most teams want both.

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Putting it together

A useful mental model: the agent is who, the skill is what, the pulse is when, and the alert rule is if. Configure those four and you’ve got a teammate that does recurring product work without being asked - and taps you on the shoulder when the numbers move.

Next: Chat and cowrite