Core Concepts

There are four words you need to know to use UpServe well.

1. Agent

The actor that does the work. Think of it as one employee.

Each agent runs on the AI model of your choice — Claude, OpenAI, or Gemini. See Build Your First Agent to pick one.

What is Father? Father is a guided setup agent you talk to when creating a new agent. Through a short interview-style conversation, Father automatically decides the new agent’s name, role, and behavior instructions.

Each agent has:

• Name and role description — what this agent is for
• Behavior instructions — personality, tone, priorities (drafted automatically through your chat with Father)
• Tool list — capabilities it can use
• Brain (memory) — a private store of know-how learned from past runs, visible only to this agent. Not shared with teammates.
• Autonomous triggers (optional) — schedules (set times), webhooks (external signals), @mentions (called by a teammate), Heartbeat (a periodic self-check), and Dream (memory consolidation). (see Triggers)

┌───────────────── One agent ────────────────────────────┐
│                                                        │
│  🪪 Name · role description                            │
│  📜 Behavior instructions                              │
│                                                        │
│  ┌────────────┐  ┌─────────────┐  ┌──────────────────┐ │
│  │  🔧 Tools  │  │  📦 Skills  │  │  🧠 Brain(memory)│ │
│  │ web search │  │   "Notion"  │  │   feedback.md    │ │
│  │    bash    │  │   "Slack"   │  │   project.md     │ │
│  │     ...    │  │     ...     │  │      ...         │ │
│  └────────────┘  └─────────────┘  └──────────────────┘ │
│                                                        │
│  ⏰ Triggers (optional) ─ schedule / webhook / mention  │
│                                                        │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

2. Tool

The agent’s capability. Think of it as a laptop, the internet, or a phone.

Below is a representative set of built-in tools. For the full list, see the Tools guide.

You can toggle tools on and off in agent settings.

3. Skill

A reusable bundle of work. Think of it as a documented operating procedure.

Where a tool is a single capability, a skill packages multiple tools, code, and task instructions together so an agent does a particular job well.

Examples:

• “Auto-publish to Instagram” skill → image generation + API call + reporting in one
• “Write to Notion” skill → bundles auth, templates, and formatting know-how

You can install skills from the Marketplace  or build and share your own.

A few concepts come with skills that help you decide which ones to trust and how well they’re holding up:

• Health — A success-rate score shown as a colored dot on each skill card: green (healthy), yellow (degraded), or red (frequently failing). New skills with no run data don’t show a dot yet.
• Lineage — Skills can be forked from other skills and evolve over time. The lineage badge on a card shows where a skill comes from, making it easier to trace its history.
• Proposals — When an agent finds a defect while running a skill, it automatically queues an improvement proposal for the skill’s author to review. Authors can accept or dismiss proposals and release a new version.
• Curator — A regular background check (every 6 hours) scans your library for unused, failing, outdated, or deprecated skills and notifies you of anything that may need attention. Nothing is deleted or changed automatically — you decide what to do with each item.

For a full walkthrough, see Skills and the Autonomous Skill System.

4. Team

Multiple agents collaborating as an organization. Think of it as a department.

For complex jobs, splitting roles is more effective than asking one agent to do everything.

Research team (no leader — equal peers)
├── Researcher — Handles all web searches
├── Analyst — Analyzes collected material
└── Writer — Produces the final document

There is no coordinator or leader. Every agent is an equal peer, and you can talk to any of them directly. Agents pass work to each other with @mentions and report results back. Team members can also chat directly with each other. A team shared memo — a key–value notepad the whole team can read and write — keeps everyone working from the same set of facts. See the Teams guide for details.

Relationship overview

                              Team
                                │
          ┌─────────────────────┼─────────────────────┐
          │                     │                     │
       Agent A               Agent B               Agent C
          │                     │                     │
          ▼                     ▼                     ▼
 Tools·Skills·Memory   Tools·Skills·Memory   Tools·Skills·Memory

💡 Skill = tools + code + task instructions wrapped as a procedure

Advanced

Brain and team shared memo

An agent’s Brain is its private space for storing know-how, notes, and project context built up over past runs. No other agent can read it — think of it as a personal notebook.

When information needs to be shared with teammates, use the team shared memo: a key–value notepad (for example, "market_analysis" paired with its value) that every agent in the team can read and update. Writing to the same key automatically bumps a version counter, so you never need to encode dates or “latest” in the key name.

Canvas

A Canvas is a versioned document — report, code, plan, or any structured output — that appears directly in the chat view. You can read and request edits without ever downloading a file.

Sharing (Snapshot)

You can share an agent via an external link or embed it in a website. The shared session runs in its own isolated conversation space; the agent’s private Brain is never exposed to outside users. Look for the Snapshot tab in agent settings.

Triggers

A trigger is the signal that wakes an agent and starts a run. Beyond a direct message from you, agents can be woken by a schedule (a set time), a webhook (a signal from an external service), an @mention (a teammate calling their name), a Heartbeat (a periodic self-check), or a Dream (a quiet-time memory consolidation pass). See the Triggers guide for details.

Asking you a question (AskUser)

When an agent needs more information mid-task, it pauses and sends you a question. You can reply in plain text, pick from options, or — for things like logins or 2FA — have the agent hand the desktop over so you can complete the step yourself.

User approvals

Some actions require your approval before they run. When an agent is about to do something sensitive or hard to undo, it pauses and asks you to confirm. See the Approvals guide for details.

Next steps

• Build Your First Agent — Get hands-on