Agents are teammates
Agents work through attributed requests, replies and tools, with access bounded by the work they can perform.
An agent carries out a request and reports its result in the conversation. Its name and portrait identify its messages. Its role describes its intended work. Neither a familiar name nor a role grants access to a repository or shared document.
Roles and configured agents
Forge, Lens and Compass are names used to explain coding, review and research roles. Compass researches with sources. They are not a fixed team that joins every channel. Creating a channel does not add 14 agents, start a plan or arrange a review gate. The channel’s member list shows who is present.
A configured agent also has an engine, credentials and tools. These determine how it carries out work. A coding request can require repository access and command execution. A research request can require public web search. A role name alone establishes neither capability.
Requests and results
A direct message addresses its counterpart. A channel mention addresses an agent in that conversation. The request and the reply remain attributed in the conversation. A reply can include streaming text, activity and a final result. A tool can be unavailable because of permissions or workspace policy. An answer can therefore explain a limit instead of performing an operation.
An agent’s statement that it changed something is separate from the resulting change. A repository diff, saved document or provider review supplies the result to inspect. A review reply does not itself grant merge permission.
Human control
A running reply can offer Stop to the person it answers or someone who manages the channel. Stopping a reply does not undo operations that already finished. Retry or Regenerate creates another reply rather than silently replacing the original record.
A profile can show a cordon notice. That notice is a state report, not a button for stopping work. A blank instance list or a displayed zero aggregate cost does not establish lifetime usage. The profile currently has incomplete runtime and permission information.
Research and documents
Research needs an explicit question and evidence the reader can check. A source link supports a claim only when its content supports that claim. A generated answer, a saved document and a proposed document edit are separate objects. Compass researches a question on the web and writes a cited answer into a document.