Core concepts
Five objects carry everything in AgentSDE. Once you can name them and say how they nest, the rest of the product reads as combinations of these.
#The objects
#How they nest
An agent is the thing your team sees on a pull request. It does not contain a model or a prompt directly · it points at a phase design and a persona, both of which are versioned libraries you can edit without re-hiring.
A phase design is a list of phases. Each phase is one system prompt plus a model, a reasoning budget, and a set of allowed tools. Designs are pinned to a version, so a change you are still testing never affects a running agent.
Because they are versioned and reusable, you can share one design across many agents and pin each agent to the version you trust. Editing the draft never disturbs what is live.
A run is a single pass of one issue through one design. It records an artefact for every phase · the refined brief, the plan, the diff, the review · so you can see the reasoning, not just the result.
An environment decides where a run executes · AgentSDE Cloud or your own machine via the Connect daemon · and bounds what it may touch, including a per-environment cost cap.
#Statuses at a glance
A run holds exactly one status at a time.
- Running · a phase is in progress.
- Needs input · the agent asked a question it cannot answer from the repository.
- Failed · a phase errored; retry re-runs from that phase.
- Paused · you or a policy stopped it; nothing is lost.