Saving Employee Templates

If you’ve built an AI employee worth reusing, you can save its setup as a template and hire the same setup again later. This page covers saving an employee template.

Templates you create can’t be published. A saved template is visible only to you, and a template made from an organization’s employee is visible only to that organization’s members. The only templates shown to everyone are the official templates built by the UpServe team.

Teams aren’t saved or installed as templates; you build one with Custom setup on the team hiring screen. Creating a skill is covered in Creating Skills. To find and install official templates, see Installing Skills & Templates.

Saving an employee as a template

1. Go to the chat screen of the employee you want to save
2. Click the Share & Publish icon at the top of the screen
3. Click Employee Template

The coach tidies it up first

Clicking the button doesn’t open the review screen right away. First, the coach prepares the template for you. This runs automatically, in four steps:

1. Looking through the employee’s personality and memory
2. Generalizing so it can be reused with a different setup
3. Checking what may not travel cleanly
4. Saving the draft

An employee with a lot of memory can take a bit longer, but it keeps running in the background even if you close the window. Once it’s ready, an Open the review screen button appears. Click it to move on.

The review screen: three steps

This is where you review, edit, and actually save the draft the coach handed you. It has three steps.

Step 1 · Basic info: Enter the template’s name, description, and category. If the employee currently has an active web app, a toggle for including it in the template also appears here (for how bundling a web app works in detail, see the Advanced section of the installing guide).

Step 2 · Memory & instructions: Pick which files to include from this employee’s persona (SOUL.md) and memory files, using checkboxes. Uncheck anything containing personal information, and edit a file’s body directly if you only want to keep part of it.

If you came through the coach, notes that describe the state of a job you’re in the middle of (personal working notes like “what to do next on this task”) start out unchecked in this list. These are true only for you, and unlikely to mean anything to whoever uses the template. The screen tells you how many were left out and which files they are. Check them back in yourself if you decide they should be included.

Step 3 · Customize · Scheduled runs: If each new employee should be set up differently for some value, turn on “Customize” and register questions (you’re walked through a short What to delegate chat at install time). If this employee has any scheduled runs, pick which ones to include in the template here as well. Condition watches and one-time scheduled runs never go into a template, so they don’t appear in this list.

If you came through the coach, this step may also show “Things to double-check before saving” above the rest. For example, if the content pins something that’s different every time it’s installed (say, a file path specific to this one employee), you’ll see a warning. This kind of warning doesn’t block saving, but it’s worth a second look: left as-is, it hands the new employee something that doesn’t apply to it. Anything that looks like sensitive information such as an API key, or hidden instructions meant to manipulate other employees, is flagged more strongly, and in that case the save button stays disabled until it’s cleaned up. Go back to the employee, fix the flagged part, then reopen the preparation chat to refresh the draft.

Once you’re done reviewing, click the save button. You’ll see a “Saved privately” notice and the template appears in My Templates. Only you can see it (members of the organization too, if it came from an organization employee). There is no way to make it public.

Saving a new version of a template

Saving an employee again after it’s already saved creates a new version (v2, v3, …). In that case, Step 1 becomes “Version info”: a Changelog field for describing what changed, plus a checklist of what to update this time (AI performance tier, config, scheduled runs, web app). Skills aren’t in that list; they’re always refreshed to whatever version the employee currently uses. If you’re saving a derived copy of another template (copied and edited), the changelog must be at least 30 characters before you can save.

Managing a saved template

For deleting a template or saving it again to pick up newer skills, see the My Templates sections of Installing Skills & Templates.

---

Advanced

Read this only if you’re curious what’s being checked under the hood when you save.

• The “true only for the author” axis: both the default-off personal notes in Step 2 and the warnings in Step 3 are computed once, when the coach builds the draft, and handed to the review screen from there. Saving an employee template always goes through the coach, so this check runs every time.
• Warnings vs. blocking: the default-off for personal working notes and the warning for per-installer values are both “just a heads-up”; neither blocks saving. Anything that looks like a secret (an API key, a password, and so on), or like a hidden instruction meant to manipulate other employees, is treated more seriously and keeps the save button disabled until it’s addressed. We don’t publish the exact rules used to detect these, but when one trips, the screen tells you which file and what was found.
• Older client compatibility: a client that doesn’t know about these two checks falls back to the safe behavior, showing every memory & instructions file checked by default.