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Creating & Configuring Agents

Your primary agent can handle a lot on its own, but specialized agents are how you scale.

Why different agents?​

A Taurus agent is not just "a Claude" or "a Codex" session. It is a working unit with its own context, memory, tools, and environment.

You might have:

  • Mike — the primary agent in charge of your Taurus setup.
  • Orion — your engineering agent for a codebase, with children like implementer, critic, and visioner for brainstorming new features, product ideas, and strategic directions.
  • Vega-CEO — an agent running a scheduled content or research pipeline.

If a task would benefit from specialization, make a new agent. If you have 5 projects with different codebases, it's probably best to create an agent for each.

What actually differs between agents?​

The biggest difference is context.

Orion can have its own memory, knowledge base, repos, and instructions for engineering work. Vega does not need to know about that at all.

Different agents can also have:

  • a different model
  • a different system prompt
  • a different tool set
  • a separate container
  • a separate workspace

Tools​

Tools matter more than many users expect. Give agents enough access to do the job and recover from mistakes; tighten things later if you have a real reason.

How can agents share work with each other?​

Yes, they run in separate containers, each with their own filesystem and workspace (in their /workspace directory). But there is a trick, and this is why we talk about agentic trees:

There is a /shared directory mounted across all containers in one tree. Think of it like a shared drive.

Parent agents can also delegate work directly to their children and use Inspect to look into what those children did.

Creating an agent​

Your primary agent can set this up for you, but it is worth learning manually too.

Click the New button in the sidebar header. The create form asks for:

  • Name — a short identifier like code-reviewer or deploy-bot
  • Model — optional, if this agent should use a different model
  • System Prompt — optional, but you will usually want to customize it
  • Hierarchy — either Standalone agent or Child of another agent

If you open the form while looking at your primary agent, Taurus defaults the new agent to Standalone agent. If you open it while looking at some other agent, it defaults to Child of another agent with that current agent preselected.

Click Create and the agent is ready. You can change the rest later in Settings.

Status at a glance​

In the agents tree, each agent shows whether it is idle, running, waiting for input, waiting on child work, or in error. Once you start using more agents, this becomes one of the most useful parts of the UI.

What's next​

Next, learn what actually persists inside an agent container in Your Agent's Environment.