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Tune your agents

When the spec was right but the result wasn't, the fix is in how Babbit builds. On the Manage side you change the agents' rules, settings and skills, and every edit is a change you review like any other.

When to use Manage

Use Build when the product should do something different. Use Manage when the agents did the wrong thing with a spec that was right. For example: you asked for a terms-of-service screen and Babbit put it somewhere you'd never look. The spec was clear; the agent's judgment wasn't. That's a rule to add in Manage.

When you open Manage, the change bar and accent turn clay, and the bar reads Describe a change to how we build. A sentence typed there opens a change scoped to your agents. Its proposals are edits to agent rules or settings, approved the same way as a spec change, and applied with Apply change.

Edit an agent's rules

Each agent follows its section of agents.md, a file of rules kept in your spec.

  1. Open Manage, then Agents.
  2. Select an agent. Its section of agents.md scrolls into view on the right.
  3. Click Edit. agents.md opens as a document.
  4. Change the rules, then click Propose.

Each agent's heading must stay; text Babbit can't read stays in the editor for you to fix. Click History to see every recorded change to the rules.

Change an agent's settings

Open an agent's Settings. Each row is one line, and each value shows where it came from: Babbit's default, your repository, your past sessions, you or a teammate, with how sure Babbit is that it's right. Hover over the chip for the reason.

SettingWhat it controls
Runs whenThe events that start the agent. Some can be turned off.
Sees your promptWhether the agent reads your sentence. Locked: only Product does.
SubagentsWhether the agent may start other agents for bounded tasks. Their model, effort and limits come from Models & providers.
ToolsThe Babbit MCP tools the agent is granted. Read-only here.
SkillsThe skills the agent loads. Read-only here.
Stop atThe agent's stop rule.

A setting that differs from Babbit's default shows a reset control on hover. Changing settings needs the Agent settings permission, which only owners hold by default.

Set a stop rule

Stop at sets the stop rule's two limits. At the first, the session pauses and asks you. At the second, Babbit stops it. Babbit enforces both from outside the workspace, on its own count of tokens and time, so an agent can't talk its way past them. Sessions are also bounded by time and by inactivity.

Turn on QA

QA is off by default.

  1. Open Manage, then Agents, and select QA.
  2. Open Settings.
  3. Under Runs when, turn on Main moved.

From then on, QA explores the running app each time main moves and opens a change for each real finding. Each finding is a change you review, so QA never edits your product on its own.

Read an agent's sessions

Open an agent's Sessions to see every session it ran: when, what started it, how it ended, how long it took, and the tokens it used.

Select a session to read its full transcript, scrubbed of secrets, with the workspace it ran in and the skills and models it ran with. A session that worked on a change links to the change, and each skill it used opens at the version it pinned.

Skills

A skill is Babbit's instructions for one kind of task: a short page of rules with an example beside each rule, naming the MCP tools it uses. Each run pins the skill versions it starts with, so a skill changing mid-run never changes that run's instructions.

To see them, open Manage, then Skills. Each row shows the skill's version, the agents that load it and how many tools it names.

SkillUsed byFor
onboard-projectProductReading a connected repository and drafting its spec and map.
propose-spec-rowsProductProposing the exact spec edits a change needs.
write-scenario-testCode WritingImplementing an approved change with a real test per scenario.
build-in-boxesCode WritingWriting code as boxes declared in the map.
keep-the-mapCode WritingKeeping newdev/map.json true in every repository a change touches.
keep-the-lookCode WritingWriting styles from design tokens, so a project's look can change them.
connect-a-serviceCode WritingConnecting to an outside service as a tested connector.
verify-with-evidenceVerifyCapturing the app before and after a change.
qa-the-appQAExploring the running app and reporting real findings.

Open a skill to read its text, its tools, its agents and its versions. Any version opens as it was.

The Babbit MCP screen

Manage › MCP lists every tool in the Babbit MCP with one sentence on what it does, whether it changes anything, and which agents may use it. Open a tool to see the sentence an agent reads when it's refused, what the tool looks up instead of trusting, and every time it said no. See Babbit MCP tools.