## What An Agent Is

Agents are the units that do work in Cofounder.

Each one is responsible for a particular kind of job. That might be engineering work, go-to-market work, SEO, security, or infrastructure. When you start a task, you are handing that work to an agent with the right scope for the job.

Agents are organized inside departments.

**Cofounder** is the exception. It is the top-level agent for the workspace, accessible from the side panel. It can help create or route tasks across the workspace instead of acting like a department-specific agent.

## What An Agent Includes

Every agent has a few core parts:

- **Instructions** that define what the agent owns and how it should behave
- **Integrations** that define which tools and systems it can use
- **Skills** that add reusable guidance for a specific kind of work
- **Department** that determines which lane of the company the agent belongs to

An engineering agent and a Marketing Agent should have different instructions, different tools, different skills, and live in different departments.

## Default Agents

After onboarding, Cofounder is available from the side panel and your workspace is seeded with agents for the main operating areas.

The seeded default agents are:

- **Operations Agent**
- **Engineer**
- **Marketing Agent**
- **Design Agent**
- **Sales Agent**
- **Support Agent**
- **Ops Agent**
- **Finance Agent**

## Default Agent Roles

- **Cofounder** is the top-level workspace agent in the side panel
- **Operations Agent** handles broad tasks and routes work to the right tools or agents
- **Engineer** is for product and app work
- **Marketing Agent** is for launches, messaging, campaigns, and marketing asset generation such as HTML decks, images, UI concepts, music, and short videos
- **Design Agent** is for brand systems, decks, email templates, visual assets, and UI kits
- **Sales Agent** is for ICP, outbound, customer development, pipeline, and GTM execution
- **Support Agent** is for support replies, ticket triage, and support workflow improvements
- **Ops Agent** is for reconciliation, recurring reporting, and operational cleanup
- **Finance Agent** is for collections, close support, billing inbox triage, and finance reporting

Cofounder sits above that layer as the workspace-level agent, while the seeded agents are for specific kinds of work.

## Adding New Agents

You can add new agents when you need an agent that does not already exist in the workspace. Examples include support, operations, finance, recruiting, or a specific internal workflow.

New agents usually include:

- one clear job
- the right integrations for that job
- the few skills that actually help

## Agents Vs. Skills Vs. Departments

- An **agent** is the worker
- A **skill** is reusable guidance attached to that worker
- A **department** is the operating area that groups agents and their work

## Next Steps

- [Engineer Agent](https://docs.cofounder.co/agents/engineer-agent)
- [Marketing Agent](https://docs.cofounder.co/agents/marketing-agent)
- [Design Agent](https://docs.cofounder.co/agents/design-agent)
- [Sales Agent](https://docs.cofounder.co/agents/sales-agent)
- [Departments](https://docs.cofounder.co/workspace/departments)
- [Skills](https://docs.cofounder.co/agents/skills)
- [Canvas](https://docs.cofounder.co/workspace/canvas)