ArchAgents

ArchAgents

Developer Docs

Customize your FDA

Three paths to teach your Forward Deployed Agent your product. Catalog, Assistant, or Designer. Pick whichever fits how you'd rather work.

Overview

Every new ArchAgents workspace comes with a Forward Deployed Agent already created and named after your company. It has the common tools attached and the join-thread + memory-capture routines wired, but it doesn't know your product yet. Step 3 of the onboarder ("Customize your FDA") gives you three ways to fix that.

The FDA is the first agent: the one we set up so you can ship to a customer fast. Build more agents alongside it when your product needs them (a releases helper, an ops bot, a specialist sub-agent the FDA can delegate to). See Agents.

Onboarding Step 3: Customize your FDA. Three paths shown: Catalog, Assistant, Designer

Read Forward Deployed Agent first if you haven't met the FDA concept yet.

The three paths

Path What you do When to pick it
Catalog Install a Solution that already knows a job. A Solution matches what you do (incident response, onboarding, customer support). Fastest.
Assistant Open the Onboarding Agent in your coding tool and let it interview you, author skills, and deploy. No Solution matches and you'd rather describe than build.
Designer Open the visual builder and edit identity, tools, skills, and routines by hand. You want to see each piece and adjust them directly.

You can switch between paths. None of them lock you in. Start with Catalog if a Solution fits and switch to Designer to fine-tune from there.

Path 1: Catalog

The Solutions catalog at /solutions lists pre-built bundles for common jobs. Import one that matches what your product does for customers; the bundle's templates appear under Available templates and you install them onto agents (or stamp out new ones) from there.

Best when:

  • Your product fits a category that already has a Solution.
  • You want a working FDA quickly and plan to refine later.
archagent list solutions
archagent import solution <slug>
archagent list agentsamples
archagent install agentsample <slug>

See Solutions for the import + install model in full.

Path 2: Assistant

The Onboarding Agent is pre-created in every workspace. It's an agent built to learn your business and build your FDA with you. Embed it in your coding tool and it interviews you, drafts the templates, and deploys them.

archagent embed start  # pick "Onboarding Agent" from the interactive picker

Then prompt it:

I run a billing platform for B2B SaaS companies. Customers ask us about invoice
disputes, plan changes, and payment retries. Build me an FDA that can help with
the first two and hand the third to a human.

The Onboarding Agent is configured to ground recommendations in the actual platform primitives (AgentTemplate, AgentRoutine, BuiltinTool, Script, CustomObject, Skill, Solution, Installation) rather than generic agent-design talk. It stores what it learns about your company in long-term memory so each session picks up where the last one left off.

Pick this when:

  • Your product is specific enough that no Solution matches.
  • You'd rather describe what you do in plain language than learn the template format.
  • You want a coding tool to do the typing.

Path 3: Designer

The Designer (/designer) is a visual editor for agent templates, scripts, skills, and workflows. Open it and edit each piece directly: identity, instructions, attached tools, knowledge, routines.

Designer home screen showing the file tree, agents list, and an empty editor canvas with the prompt to pick a file

Pick this when:

  • You want to see each piece and edit it precisely.
  • You're tuning an FDA you already customized via Catalog or Assistant.
  • You don't use a coding tool and don't want to learn the CLI.

Changes auto-save to the same workspace your terminal sees, so you can switch between Designer and archagent mid-edit.

After Step 3

Whichever path you took, the FDA now has skills, tools, and routines attached. Confirm it works:

  1. Open the FDA from /agents.
  2. Use the CHAT section in the left rail to send a question your product would actually get.
  3. Watch the response. If the agent uses the wrong tool, the wrong skill, or hallucinates an answer, go back to the path you used and adjust.

Then continue to Step 4 (Invite your customer) when the FDA can handle a real question end to end.

Where to go next

  1. Solutions: the catalog model in detail.
  2. Agents: the underlying agent template.
  3. Skills: how reusable instruction bundles work.
  4. Embed: step into the FDA's exact tools from your coding tool to test it.