Hiring & customizing agents

A team's roster isn't fixed. You can hire new agents, retire ones you don't need, and tune how each agent behaves - both from the web app and by asking the CEO.

Hiring a new agent

Hire agent on the Team page (or the + beside Team in the project menu) asks how you want to go about it, and offers three ways:

Browse the marketplace - take a proven role out of one of the ready-made teams. It arrives with a written system prompt, a budget and a face, and the CEO fits it to the team you already have. See Team marketplace.
Ask the CEO - opens a chat thread for this project with the opening message written for you. Add what you need, send, and the CEO works out the role and drafts it. It checks the marketplace first and tells you which role it started from.
Write the role yourself - the hire screen, where you fill in the role and its system prompt directly.

The three differ in where they end. A marketplace role is added by the CEO without a separate approval, because you already chose it off the catalog. The other two come back to you as an approval: the CEO writes or tidies the full role spec and files it, and you can modify the role, system prompt, budget, heartbeat and code access before approving. Nothing is added to the roster that way without your sign-off.

HQ is not staffed from here. It holds the CEO and Coach, who work across every project.

When you hire an agent you set:

Role - its title and a short description of what it's responsible for.
Reports to - the manager this agent answers to. This sets the reporting line in the org chart, which is what lets work be delegated to and from the agent, so it's worth getting right (it defaults to the Captain). You can change it later from the agent's settings, and the Captain/CEO can also adjust reporting lines during a coherence review.
System prompt - the instructions that define how it works. Write the role itself: Hezo adds the agent's identity (its team, the team's description, its manager) above what you write, and its live context (skills, team preferences, project docs, today's date) below it, on every run. Nothing is required of your text, and the strip above the editor lists every block Hezo adds. If you want one of those values at a specific point in your own wording instead, type {{ in the editor to insert it - Hezo then leaves its own copy of that value out.
Model - which provider/model it runs on (defaults to the team's model; override per agent if you want).
Heartbeat - how often it wakes to look for work. There is no default: the cadence drives both how fast the agent picks up work and how much it spends, so you pick it yourself and the hire form will not submit until you have. The shortest cadence the scheduler runs is 60 minutes. When the CEO or a Captain files the hire instead, it asks you for the cadence before filing rather than choosing one for you. The agent's page shows a live countdown to its next heartbeat (hidden while the agent is disabled or paused).
Budget - optional spending limits (see Budgets & cost control).
Code access - whether the agent works in the project's code workspace.

Once approved, the agent is onboarded into the team and starts picking up work on its heartbeat.

New agents wait for the team setup review

Adding an agent - by hiring one, or by provisioning a whole roster when a project is created - files a team setup review task automatically. That review is what fits the new agent to the team: it reconciles reporting lines, rewrites the descriptive blobs teammates read, and gives the agent the team context its every run is built on.

Until that review is done, any task assigned to the new agent is created Blocked, with the setup review listed as its blocker on the task page. Nothing is lost and nobody has to remember to sequence it: when the review is marked done, every task waiting on it moves back to Backlog and its assignee is woken automatically. This applies however the task was filed - by you in the web app, or by the CEO, a Captain or a teammate.

Agents already on the team are unaffected: they keep picking up work as normal while a new teammate's setup review is open. If you deliberately want a new agent to start before its review lands, remove the blocker from the task's page.

Editing system prompts

Every agent's system prompt is editable from its settings at any time. Changes take effect on the agent's next run, so you can correct course - tighten scope, add a convention, change tone - without rebuilding anything. An edit can never cost the agent its identity or live context: Hezo composes both around whatever you save. Switch to Preview to read the whole prompt as the agent receives it, with every value filled in.

Reviewing an agent's runs

Every agent has an Executions tab listing its runs - what triggered each one, how long it took, what it cost, and the full log. The list opens on every run, newest first. The filter above it narrows to a single outcome: All, Succeeded (runs that finished cleanly) or Errored (runs that failed or timed out). A run that is still queued or running, or one that was cancelled, belongs to neither narrow view and appears under All. The choice is part of the page address, so a filtered view can be bookmarked or shared, and opening a run and coming back returns you to the view you were in.

A run waiting its turn shows as queued, not as an error - it keeps its place and starts as soon as whatever it is waiting for is free. A run waits for a container to free up when the instance is already at its limit. If the wait outlasts its patience the run is recorded as cancelled and the work goes back on the queue to be picked up again; that is not a failure, and it is why cancelled runs are their own thing rather than errors. Hover the queued run's info icon to see the reason. See how much can run at once.

Cancelled covers one more case, and it is the only one that asks anything of you. If a run is queued but never begins - Hezo lost track of it before the agent launched - the work is put back on the queue and runs again on its own. Should that keep happening, Hezo stops after three attempts, says so on the run, posts a note in the task, and raises an item in your Inbox. That run carries a Retry button, which is the only cancelled run that does: a run you stopped yourself, or one whose work is already back on the queue, has nothing left to press. A run like that is not counted as an error, so it does not raise the task's error marker; the note in the task and the Inbox item are how you find it.

Per-agent model override

By default the agents on a team share the team's model. You can override the model for any individual agent, so (for example) one agent runs on a frontier model for hard reasoning while the rest run on something cheaper and faster. Mixing providers within a single team is fully supported. See AI model support.

Retiring & reinstating agents

When a team no longer needs a role, you can retire (disable) the agent - from its settings in the web app, or just by asking the CEO. Retiring stops the agent from being scheduled and unassigns it from any open tasks, but keeps all of its history, so it's fully reversible: reinstate (enable) it at any time and it picks work back up on its heartbeat. The CEO actions this directly once you confirm, which is handy after a project's direction changes and several roles no longer fit. (A team's Captain can't be retired by the CEO - only an admin can, from the web app. The global CEO and Coach run coordination and review across every project, so they're essential and can't be retired at all.)

Other settings

You can also adjust an agent's heartbeat interval and budgets over time, and pause or resume agents when you need to. Standing preferences you give the CEO in chat are remembered and applied going forward.