Configuring Agents
Every configuration change to an agent today happens in Studio — the CLI can run an agent and read its state (machina agent get, machina agent run), but it has no update, set-frequency, or similar write command.
Fields you can edit
| Field | Where | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Title | Agent → Edit | Free text. |
| Description | Agent → Edit | Free text. |
| Status | Agent → Edit | active / inactive. |
| Name | — | Locked after creation. Not editable from the form. |
| Frequency | Agent detail page, dedicated dialog | Minutes, stored as context["config-frequency"] (e.g. 0.5 = every 30 seconds). Editable inline both from the agents list and from the agent's own detail page. |
Frequency in practice
Frequency is not part of the create/edit form above — it has its own small dialog on the agent's detail page (and an inline editor on the list view). Examples of what a value means:
config-frequency | Runs |
|---|---|
0.03 | ~every 2 seconds |
0.5 | every 30 seconds |
1 | every minute |
60 | every hour |
1440 | once a day |
WARNING
There's no CLI equivalent for this today. If you're scripting agent setup, frequency has to be set through Studio (or through whatever mechanism the installed skill/template used to provision the agent in the first place — see Creating Agents).
Why an active agent might never run
Status and frequency aren't the whole picture. The scheduler only dispatches an agent when all three of these hold:
statusisactive- it has a
config-frequency - its
scheduledflag is false (and it isn't alreadyprocessing)
That third one is the trap: an agent can show active with a valid cadence and still never fire, because a scheduled flag left set to true makes the scheduler skip it every pass — silently, with nothing in the UI to indicate it. If a schedule looks correct but nothing is running, that's the first thing to check.
machina context-graph status flags exactly this case as scheduled=True (won't fire).
Workflows and documents
The agent's detail page shows the workflows it triggers and any documents associated with it — but that Workflows tab is read-only. Neither "View Code" nor the workflow's own create/edit form let you attach a workflow to an agent either.
There's no way to attach a workflow to an already-existing agent from the Studio UI today — that association gets made when a template provisions an agent and its workflows together (see Creating Agents).
Related
- Creating Agents — the initial four-field form.
- Operating Agents — running and inspecting once configured.