> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.machina.gg/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Agents

> Agents run your workflows on a schedule — each with a cadence, a status, and an execution history.

An Agent is the scheduling primitive in Machina: **"Agents run your workflows on a schedule — each with a cadence, a status, and an execution history."** That's the literal description Studio shows on the Agents list — it's the most accurate one-line definition available, so this hub uses the same language the product does.

Concretely, an Agent has:

* **Identity**: `title` (display name), `name` (slug, set once at creation and immutable), `description`.
* **Status**: `active` or `inactive`.
* **Frequency**: how often it runs, stored as `context["config-frequency"]` in minutes (e.g. `0.5` = every 30 seconds).
* **Workflows**: the one or more workflows it triggers on that cadence.
* **Documents**: records associated with the agent, shown on its detail page.
* **Execution history**: every past run, inspectable individually.

## When to use an Agent

Use an Agent when you need something to run **on its own, repeatedly** — syncing data, refreshing embeddings, posting scheduled content — without a human or an external caller triggering it each time. If you need to run something **on demand** instead (a one-off pipeline triggered by a request), that's a plain [Workflow](/core-components/workflows) run directly, not an Agent.

## The four things you'll actually do

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Creating Agents" icon="plus" href="/agents/creating-agents">
    How an Agent actually gets made today — Studio form vs. installing a skill/template.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Configuring Agents" icon="sliders" href="/agents/configuring-agents">
    The real fields you can set, and which ones the CLI can't touch (yet).
  </Card>

  <Card title="Operating Agents" icon="play" href="/agents/operating-agents">
    Running, watching, and inspecting executions from the terminal.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Agent Commands via CLI" icon="terminal" href="/agents/cli-commands">
    A copy-paste command reference, plus CLI command vs. workflow vs. MCP tool.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

## Related

* [Workflows](/core-components/workflows) — what an Agent actually triggers.
* [`machina agent`](/cli/commands/agent) — the CLI command group.
* [MCP](/mcp/overview) — how an Agent's workflow can be exposed as a tool to an external agent.