Specialists
A general agent does everything a little; a specialist does one job all the way.
A general agent does everything a little. The work that matters comes in a few shapes, so give each shape an agent built for it.
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A specialist is not a prompt, a skill or a short pipeline. It is a complete harness of its own, with its own engine, built and tuned for one kind of work. It runs a whole engineering workflow from the brief to a checked result, and it keeps going on its own, for an hour or more when the job needs it, without stopping to ask you anything.
Try it in CodeAF
- Where
In any conversation.
- Type
/senior-devThen your brief, and press Enter.
- You see
The coding specialist takes the whole job as a task of its own.
How a specialist fits into CodeAF
Every specialist ships inside CodeAF, so there is nothing to install. You start one by name with /<name> and a brief, or the chat hands work to one when the work fits: it puts up a card that asks wants to start a [senior-dev] task: with the title, and the run starts when you say yes or when the card's clock runs out. The run is a task of the conversation that started it. Its row on the side list wears the specialist's name as a badge, [senior-dev], and you can open it to watch every step or stop it.
A specialist reaches a model only through CodeAF. Your key never reaches it, and every call it makes is priced into your spending and held to the run's dollar and time ceiling. When the run ends, the chat reads how it came out and acts on it: it offers to merge work that passed, or sends the work back with a sharper brief.
Specialists today
Today: senior-dev, the coding specialist, #1 of ten harnesses on DeepSWE.
Coming soon: a code-review specialist based on PR-AF.
Coming soon: create your own specialist by describing the job.
Things to build
- Talk it through, then hand it off: work out a fix in the chat, then say "give this to senior-dev": the brief carries what the chat found, and the change comes back on its own branch. Hand a job to a specialist
- A review line for main: a team where one member hands each change to senior-dev and another reads the branch and runs the tests, with a merge only on a pass. Review every change
- A change that runs while you are away: start
/senior-devwith the change and what done means before you leave; it works alone under its $10 and 3 hour ceiling, and the chat offers the merge when it ends.
Go further
Coming soon: describe the org you want and CodeAF builds it: teams, managers, budgets, standing orders.