Agent Interaction Guidelines (AIG)
Principles for agents that work openly and responsibly alongside people in Pulse.
Agents can take on work that once required a person to remain at the keyboard. That changes what people need from the interface: they must know who is acting, what is happening, and when they need to step in.
These principles give people a predictable way to work alongside an agent. They apply whether the app is answering a short question or carrying out a long issue delegation.
These guidelines describe the experience an agent should create in Pulse. The getting started guide explains how to install an agent app; developing the interaction maps these principles to sessions, activities and API calls.
Principles & practices
An agent should always disclose that it’s an agent
People should never have to infer whether a teammate or a program wrote a message. An installed agent app has its own application user and an Application badge in the delegate and mention pickers. Use that identity for every API request and activity. Do not post through a person's account or write as though the agent were a human teammate.
An agent should inhabit the platform natively
Let people delegate an issue or @mention the app in a comment. Continue the work in the resulting agent session, where the request, progress and answer stay together. Use issue fields, comments and session activities for their intended purposes. An external dashboard can add detail, but it should not be the only place where people can follow the work.
An agent should provide instant feedback
Silence makes a request look lost. Acknowledge a new session with a short thought activity within 10 seconds of its created event. Answer the webhook within 5 seconds, then run the work asynchronously. If the agent needs longer, keep the session current with meaningful progress activities.
An agent should be clear and transparent about its internal state
People should be able to tell whether the app is working, waiting for them, finished or blocked. Pulse derives the session state from activities: thought and action mean active work; elicitation asks for input; response completes the work; error explains why it cannot continue. A plan and short action updates make longer runs easier to follow.
Do not put credentials or private tool output in activities. Anyone who can see the issue may be able to read them.
An agent should respect requests to disengage
When a person presses Stop or removes the delegation, Pulse sends a prompted event with the stop signal. Cancel ongoing work, make no further changes, and post one final response or error describing the state left behind. Resume only after a new request from a person.
An agent cannot be held accountable
Delegation sets an issue's delegate, while a human remains its assignee. The agent can investigate, make permitted changes and report the result, but it cannot close an issue or change its own delegation. Hand completed work back in a response so the assignee can review and decide what happens next.
Get involved
Start with getting started to register and install the app. Then follow interaction best practices for the first response, follow-ups, interruptions and handoff.
Last updated on