Claude agents: when one Claude isn't enough
Agents give Claude specialist teammates — a researcher, an editor, an analyst — each with its own instructions and boundaries. Here's how they work in Sofos.
A skill teaches Claude a procedure. An agent goes further: it's a whole specialist persona, with its own instructions, its own focus, and its own limits on what it's allowed to touch. When Claude hits a task that matches an agent's specialty, it hands the work over — the way you'd loop in the analyst on your team rather than eyeballing a spreadsheet yourself.
What an agent file looks like
An agent is a single markdown file. At the top, a few lines say what the agent is called, when to use it, and which tools it may use. Everything below that is the agent's briefing — the standing instructions it works from every time it's called. The editor agent in this library, for instance, is told to critique documents but never rewrite them; its file simply doesn't allow editing tools. That's a guarantee, not a suggestion.
Because each agent works in its own separate session, it stays focused. Your main conversation with Claude doesn't fill up with the fifty web pages the research agent skimmed — you just get the findings back.
When to reach for an agent instead of a skill
- The job is a role, not a recipe. "Summarize meeting notes in our format" is a skill. "Be a skeptical editor for everything I write" is an agent.
- The work is heavy on reading or digging — research sweeps, going through a folder of interviews, crunching a CSV — and you want the mess kept out of your main chat.
- You want hard boundaries, like a reviewer that can read everything but change nothing.
Installing an agent from the Academy
Agents download as a single .md file, and they live in a folder called .claude/agents inside your workspace. The easiest install: tell Claude to do it. In Sofos, type something like "There's an agent file called doc-editor.md in my Downloads — install it in this workspace." Claude creates the agents folder if needed and moves the file into place. Prefer doing it by hand? Drop the file into .claude/agents in your workspace folder using Finder — same result.
Once installed, you can call an agent by name ("have the doc editor go over this PRD") or just describe work that fits its specialty and let Claude make the handoff. Each agent's file is plain markdown — open it, read the briefing, and tweak the instructions until the specialist works the way your team does.