Lab 5: Chat with an agent and give it tasks

Goal

Use two more ways of working with an agent: a back-and-forth conversation, and a task you hand over and collect later.

Chat or task?

• Chat is for thinking things through. You write a message, the agent replies, you follow up. Each reply is a normal run, so the same tools, approvals and budgets apply.
• A task is a job you describe once. The agent works on it in the background and the result appears in a list when it is done.

Choose chat when you want to steer. Choose a task when you know what you want and can wait.

Steps: chat

1. Open the "Research summariser" agent from Lab 1.
2. Choose the Chat tab, then New conversation.
3. In the box labelled Message, type: "Summarise https://example.com in two bullets." and choose Send.
4. Watch the reply appear. Then send a follow-up: "Now make it one sentence." The agent sees the recent messages, so it knows what "it" is.
5. If the agent needs to do something that requires approval, the run waits and you decide in Approvals as usual. During a reply you can use the controls on the message: Pause, Resume or Cancel.
6. Use Delete conversation when you are finished. It removes the messages and stops a reply in progress.

One reply runs at a time. If you send while the agent is still replying, the page asks you to wait.

Steps: task

1. On the same agent open the Tasks tab.
2. Under Give a task, in What should it do?, type: "Summarise https://example.com and tell me what the page is for."
3. Optionally fill Title (optional) and Needed by (optional). Needed by is a note to yourself, such as "Friday morning". It does not schedule anything.
4. Choose Give task. The task appears with a status such as Working, Waiting for your approval or Done.
5. When it finishes, read the result preview, choose Open run to see the full trace, or Run again to repeat it. Delete removes a finished task.
6. The Tasks page in the top bar shows tasks from all your agents.

Check your work

• The chat reply used the earlier message when you said "make it one sentence".
• The task moved from Working to Done and Open run shows a normal trace.
• Both appear in Runs, with costs, because both are ordinary runs.

What you learned

• Chat and tasks are two interfaces onto the same safe runtime, with the same tools, approvals and budgets.
• Chat is for steering; tasks are for handing over and collecting.
• If an agent is paused, you cannot chat with it or give it tasks until you resume it.