Quick start: Agents

Agents hand a long-running task to an autonomous agent that works in the background while you do something else.

Enable them first

Nothing to install: the Copilot SDK is a normal dependency. What agents drive is a ~90 MB native runtime, and that stays opt-in — open Settings → Agents and click Install the Copilot CLI. It downloads in the background while you keep working, and starts the runtime without a restart.

If you already have a copilot on your PATH (Homebrew, npm, the official installer), Precursor picks it up and there is nothing to install at all.

Agents come on once the runtime resolves; Settings → Agents is the switch on top of that, and reports whether the runtime actually started.

Run your first agent

Open Agents → New agent, describe the task, and start it. You land on the dashboard rather than inside the run: cards are sorted by urgency, so anything waiting on you floats to the top, and a card shows the tool an agent is running plus its own one-line narration of what it's doing.

Expect to answer permission prompts — until you loosen the approval policy, the agent asks before each tool call. Set it per agent, or globally in Settings → Agents.

Then try

• A token budget so a runaway run parks itself instead of spending.
• Run autonomously to turn the task into a standing objective the agent pursues across several turns.
• Chaining agents into a reusable pipeline.

Full detail: Agents.