Every workspace has one agent: Pilea. It carries a set of skills - reusable instructions - and each skill can have a pulse, a schedule that runs it on its own. Everything Pilea produces lands in one feed, labelled with the skill that produced it.

You’ll find all of this under Skills in the sidebar, which has three tabs: Activity (the feed), Skills (what Pilea knows how to do), and Schedule (a calendar of upcoming runs).

Customising Pilea

Pilea is the sender of everything on this page, so its settings sit right there: click Customize Pilea at the top of the Skills page, or go to Settings → Pilea. You can set:

Identity - the avatar and accent colour Pilea shows on updates, in chat, and in Slack.
Writing style - the tone of voice for updates, from Balanced and Quick update to Executive summary and Customer brief.
Notification defaults - the Slack channels and email recipients updates go to when a skill doesn’t pick its own. This is the workspace-wide fallback.

Skills: reusable instructions

A skill is a reusable instruction set - a recipe Pilea can execute on demand or on a schedule. Write it once, and Pilea runs it consistently every time.

On the Skills tab you’ll see two views:

Installed - the skills in your workspace. Search them by name once the list grows.
Templates - skills written by Pilea, such as thematic analysis, voice of customer, interview debrief, bug triage and a weekly product update. Preview a template to read exactly what it does, then add it with one click.

To write your own, click New skill and pick From scratch, or take the easier route: Open in chat with Pilea, describe what you want, and Pilea drafts the skill for you.

In the skill editor, @ references workspace items, # references tools, and / references other skills. Drafts auto-save about 1.5 seconds after you stop typing, so an accidental navigation doesn’t lose your work. A skill is live once you Publish it.

User-invocable skills appear as /slash-commands in chat. Type /, pick the skill, and Pilea runs it right there in the conversation. Each installed skill also has a Run now button, and any skill can be triggered from outside Pilea through the API (POST /v1/agents/{agentId}/skills/{skillId}/run), so a deploy pipeline or CRM automation can ask for a fresh summary. See Using the Pilea API and MCP.

Pulses: skills on a schedule

A skill can have a pulse - a schedule that makes it run on its own. No one has to remember to ask; the work just shows up.

Open the schedule on a skill to pick a cadence: only when I run it, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or a custom cadence in days or weeks, with a time and timezone. Pulses fire at most once per hour.

Pilea comes with one pulse out of the box: a weekly product and feedback summary, delivered by email to the workspace’s members.

The Schedule tab shows all upcoming runs on a calendar, so you know what’s about to land and when.

Delivery: where updates go and how much arrives

Every run lands in the Activity feed regardless of any other delivery. On top of that, each skill has two separate delivery targets, set with the Slack and Email buttons on the skill itself: Slack channels and email recipients. Leave them empty and the skill uses the workspace defaults from Customize Pilea.

Each skill also has a notification mode, How much to send, that controls what gets posted to those channels when a run completes:

Mode	What arrives
Silent	No message - the run happens quietly and is only in the feed
Summary	One line plus a link to the full update
Full report	The complete content plus a link

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

The Activity feed

The Activity tab is where Pilea reports back. Each update shows:

The skill that produced it.
Delivery chips - Slack and Email - confirming where it was actually sent, with a count when it went to more than one channel or recipient.
Its status while running (Pending, Generating) and Insufficient data if there wasn’t enough to answer.

Updates can include charts. Open one to read it in full, ask follow-up questions, download it as a PDF, or save it for later. For how a single run works, see How the Insights Agent works.

Putting it together

A useful mental model: Pilea is who, the skill is what, the pulse is when, and the notification mode is how loudly. Configure those and you’ve got a teammate that does recurring product work without being asked, and only taps you on the shoulder when it should.

Next: Chat and cowrite

Agents, skills, and pulses