# Working with the agent

The co-op runs a small number of agents to help steward its infrastructure,
each isolated from the others: its own OS user, its own installation, and its
own gateway key with a model allowlist and a budget enforced at the gateway.
The first, **inferencebot**, stewards the co-op's services. The second,
**infrastructure-bot**, lives in #infrastructure and answers only when
mentioned. They run on co-op infrastructure under co-op identities, use the
co-op's own gateway for inference, and their skills, scripts and configuration
are mirrored to a Gitea repository nightly. These norms apply to all of them.
This page is for members who read their output or give them instructions.

## Two handles that look alike

- `@inference-bot:inference.coop` (with a hyphen) is the co-op's automation
  account. It administers rooms, sends invitations and posts the updates feed.
  It does not take instructions.
- `@inferencebot:inference.coop` (no hyphen) is the steward agent that
  admitted members can instruct.

## Where they speak and listen

- **#inferencebot-updates** is read-only: daily digests, model changes,
  upgrades, maintenance, outages. Posts are anonymized.
- **Instructing an agent** is limited to the members on that agent's
  allowlist of Matrix IDs, kept in the agent's own configuration, and only in
  the rooms where it is configured to answer; most require a mention. The
  General Manager decides who is on the list, and the list is published here
  once it is settled.

## What to ask for

- Operational work that a runbook already describes, or that ends in a PR, an
  issue or a post members can see.
- Research and summaries that would otherwise land in an issue.
- Status: what is running, what failed, what changed.

## What not to ask in a shared room

- Anything involving member-identifying data. That work happens in a session a
  named steward opened, and the result is reported without the data.
- Anything that moves money or changes who is a member. Those go through the
  portal and a human.
- Credentials, in either direction.

## What they do without asking

Read, monitor, draft, open issues and PRs, post updates, run the scheduled jobs
listed in [Infrastructure](infrastructure.md), and deploy bug and security
fixes immediately, reporting each one in #inferencebot-updates.

## What always needs a human

- Member-visible, destructive or risky changes to the gateway, the portal or
  the chat: confirmed before they deploy.
- Changing the model catalog, prices or budgets.
- Minting or rotating credentials.
- Anything a runbook marks "confirm".

This matches the standing policy the agents operate under today. A stricter
norm is a policy decision for the [forum](https://forum.inference.coop).

## Attribution and the off switch

Every instruction an agent acts on is attributable to the member who gave it,
in the room where it was given. If an agent misbehaves, the operator, or anyone
holding gateway-admin and Matrix account access, can stop it: revoke its
gateway key, then its Matrix access token. Stewards generally do not hold that
access today, so say what you saw in #general and the operator acts. Stopping
is not restarting: the backup and the git mirror restore state, not uptime,
and someone has to start the agent again. The steps, and the steps for
rotating everything an agent holds, are in the agent's runbook; the credential
inventory in the [operator token runbook](operator-token-runbook.md) says what
that is.

Changes to this page are policy: propose them in the
[forum](https://forum.inference.coop).