Running agents

Because there is no privileged “the agent,” every command that drives an agent names which one. Agents coexist; you address one by its alias.

Addressing an agent

On the CLI, the agent alias is required, there is no default agent:

zeroclaw agent -a <alias> -m "hello"

The alias is the <alias> half of an [agents.<alias>] block. For the full CLI surface and every flag, see the generated CLI reference.

Coexistence and isolation

Agents run side by side from one install. Each one keeps its own workspace, memory, and identity (see Filesystem components), so by default nothing one agent does leaks into another. They share only what their config references share, a provider, a channel, a bundle.

There are two ways one agent reaches another, each separately gated:

• Messaging on a shared channel: two agents can address each other only where they share a peer group.
• Delegation: an agent can hand a task to another agent only when both conditions hold, its own risk profile’s delegation_policy.mode is allow (the default is forbidden), and the target agent shares the same risk profile. Delegation never crosses trust tiers, an agent on a hardened profile cannot delegate to one on a permissive profile. The shared risk profile is itself the allow-list: the delegate roster offered to the model is exactly the other agents on the caller’s profile, and only when delegation is permitted. See Delegation & SubAgents for the full gate behavior and the exact refusal messages.

When an agent needs a one-off helper instead of an existing peer, it spawns an ephemeral SubAgent that inherits its identity and security policy for a single task, then disappears.

Agents in zerocode

zerocode is the terminal UI for driving agents. Two panes put an agent in front of you:

• The Code pane runs an agent against your working tree for coding tasks.
• The Chat pane is a conversational view of an agent.

Both panes drive a specific agent, and zerocode can give each agent its own colour palette so you can tell them apart at a glance, see Per-agent themes. The Config pane is the preferred place to add and wire agents without editing files by hand.

Operating multiple agents at once

zeroclaw daemon brings up every enabled agent together, each answering on its own channels. Adding an agent is additive: define a new [agents.<alias>] block, wire its references, and it joins the running set, the existing agents are untouched.

For the runtime internals, the permission model, the memory model, and the agent loop, see Runtime internals.