Agents

An agent is a subagent: a specialised assistant that your skills and your main coding agent can delegate focused work to, such as reviewing code or researching a codebase. Each agent has its own instructions and settings, and is exported to Claude Code, Codex and Cursor together with the rest of your agent setup.

Note

Agents are not the same as AGENTS.md. AGENTS.md holds project-wide instructions for every coding agent, while an agent here is a separate subagent with its own instructions that is only used when work is delegated to it.

Creating and editing an agent

Open your agent setup in the web app, go to its Agents tab and choose Add agent. An agent has these fields:

Agent name — the name your coding tools use for the subagent.
Description (required) — when the subagent should be used. Coding tools read this to decide when to delegate work to it, so make it specific.
Instructions — the subagent's prompt, written in Markdown without frontmatter.

Choose Save instructions to save your changes. Each save creates a new version of the agent.

Agent settings

An agent's settings are the frontmatter that Athenode writes into each target's agent file when it exports the setup. They're grouped into tabs: Common, Claude Code, Codex CLI and Cursor. Settings on the Common tab apply to every target, and the other tabs hold settings for one coding tool only.

Two settings you'll often use are:

model — which model the subagent runs on. It's set per target, and the available values differ between tools; for example, Claude Code offers specific model aliases or inherit to use the same model as the main agent.
tools — which tools the subagent may use. This is a Claude Code setting only.

The fields and values available depend on the target, and they can change as the coding tools evolve. The settings panel always shows what's currently supported. See the CLI page for how exports work.

MCP servers on an agent

An agent doesn't have a separate MCP screen. Instead, you can give it its own MCP servers in its settings: on the Claude Code tab, the mcpServers field has a list editor with Add MCP server, and the Codex CLI tab has its own mcp_servers field.

These per-agent servers are only available to that subagent. Servers on the setup's MCP servers tab apply to the whole setup instead — see MCP servers.

What's next

Skills — the reusable instructions that delegate work to agents
AGENTS.md — project-wide instructions for every coding agent
MCP servers — the tools shared by the whole setup
CLI — how agents are exported to Claude Code, Codex and Cursor