Agents are templates. Grid starts one when a card enters a stage, and the Agents tab of the Agents page is where you read and change them.
Not in 0.3.0. The Agents tab is built and arrives with the next alpha release.
Each arrow that starts work has its own agent:
| AGENT | WHERE IT WORKS |
|---|---|
| Refiner | The backlog: it refines ideas. See backlog. |
| Planner | Inbox to Prepare. |
| Starter | Inbox to Doing, for card types that skip Prepare. |
| Builder | Prepare to Doing. |
| Self-reviewer | Doing to Review. |
| Adversarial reviewer | Doing to Review, when the card's difficulty switches adversarial review on. See models. |
| Deliverer | Into Deliver. |
| Verifier | Into Verify. |
Each has two columns side by side. YOUR PROMPT is editable, with reset to default. WHAT THE AGENT RECEIVES is the message assembled at spawn: your prompt, the card type's note and variant, the concurrency rules, the sections Grid also requires and the sections the card must carry. Switch it to a card type to see what that type's cards get. The card itself, its memory and the project context are added at spawn and are not shown there.
SECTIONS IT LEAVES ON THE CARD lists, read-only, what the agent must write before the card moves on, and GRID ALSO REQUIRES switches the extra sections Grid adds for the whole workspace on or off.
A research card needs a different brief than a bug. Under CARD TYPE VARIANTS, ＋ Add a prompt for a type adds an extra prompt, sent after the stage prompt and the type's note, to that type's cards at that stage only. Only the types that actually reach the agent are listed, and the Refiner has no variants.
An agent does not pick a model directly. Its MODEL ROLE is one of research and planning, implementation, or delivery and validate, and the role maps to a model and effort through the difficulty table, so a hard card gets a stronger model without every prompt naming one. A card's own per-stage pin still wins. The Refiner is the exception: it always runs on Claude. See models.
Guards are agents with a responsibility instead of a card. Three are defined: the Pipeline keeper, which investigates a CI failure and finds the card that caused it; the Config keeper, which keeps grid.toml, run configs and environments true to the repo; and the Agent medic, which restarts, compacts or moves stuck and failing sessions. You can edit each one's brief and model role.
Nothing wakes the guards yet: they are listed as not running, and their briefs are stored and shown but sent nowhere.
What runs on a clock today is a card, not an agent: a card can be scheduled from its session, and an Agent card files a run on its cadence, when the event it watches fires, or both. See cards.