Creating and Configuring Your First Bot

Quick Creation: Three Fields Is Enough to Start

The bot creation form opens from the top of the Bots Pane. The minimum it requires is three fields: Name (the profile identifier used internally and in CLI commands), Title (the display name shown in the roster and conversations), and Description (shown in the bot's context to help it understand its own role).

Submitting those three fields creates a bot immediately. It inherits the main profile's defaults -- model, toolsets, skills -- and is ready to use right away. For a quick specialist bot, this three-field form is all you need.

The Advanced Options

An Advanced disclosure exposes the full configuration surface. These options are not required but become essential as you specialize bots for particular roles:

• Clone from existing or Fresh profile: Cloning copies configuration from an existing profile (including toolsets and API key configuration). Fresh starts from a blank slate. For a bot that shares your main setup, clone. For a lightweight single-purpose agent, fresh or the Create empty option below.
• Create empty: Skips bundled skills. Useful for bots that should only have the specific tools you explicitly enable -- no defaults inherited.
• Model and provider pinning: Each bot can be pinned to a different model and provider, independently of all other bots and the main profile. Pin a reasoning-heavy bot to your strongest model and a lightweight monitor bot to a faster, cheaper one.
• Custom SOUL.md: The bot's SOUL.md is a Markdown file that defines persona, behavior, constraints, and instructions. This is how you give each bot a distinct role and personality. A researcher bot's SOUL.md might emphasize citation and synthesis; a coder bot's might emphasize clean output and reasoning before writing.
• Per-skill, per-toolset, and per-MCP server enablement: Checkboxes let you enable or disable individual skills, toolsets, and MCP connections for this bot. Useful for restricting what a bot can do -- a read-only monitor bot should not have file write access.
• Shared keys (default): By default, a bot shares the OAuth and token pool of the main profile. You can override this with credential pools for full isolation if the bot needs separate API access.

Creating Bots on Other Machines

When you have multiple backends registered in Settings → Connections, a Create on picker appears in the bot creation form. Select which device should host the new bot's profile.

The profile is created on the target machine's backend without switching your current window gateway. You stay connected to your primary machine while provisioning a bot on another. Bots created on different machines appear in the same shared roster, and when names exist across multiple machines, they receive @name-device handles to disambiguate them in @mentions and group chats.

Managing Bots: Edit, Duplicate, Delete

Right-clicking any bot in the roster reveals management options:

• Edit Profile reopens the creation surface with current values populated, allowing you to change any setting including model pin, SOUL.md, and skill configuration.
• Duplicate creates a full clone of the bot -- configuration, skills, SOUL.md, memory, and appearance. Useful for spinning up a role variant or creating a staging bot with the same capabilities.
• Delete Profile permanently removes the bot with a destructive confirmation dialog. The default profile cannot be deleted.