Designing agents in the studio

This guide covers the three ways to shape a RAiN AI Project: building with a prompt, editing on the canvas, and starting from a template — plus the knowledge base that grounds your agents in real business facts.

Build with a prompt

The fastest way to design is to describe what you want and let RAiN draft it.

From the Studio home:

Type what the project should do into the big prompt box (or click an example chip).
Click Build it — a new project is created, designed, and opened on the canvas.

Inside a project:

Open the Build with AI panel (left side; the panel icon in the toolbar shows/hides it).
Type a request into the chat — a first design, or an incremental change like "add a reviewer that checks the reply before it goes out."
Click Build. The assistant replies with what it added ("Done — added 1 agent and 1 task…") and the canvas updates.

Changes are additive: the assistant adds what you asked for and never wipes your existing work. You can keep the conversation going, one refinement at a time.

Edit on the canvas (Visual Editor)

The canvas shows agents and tasks as connected cards:

Action	How
Move things around	Drag any card; your layout is saved automatically
Edit an agent or task	Click the card (or right-click → Edit)
Add an agent or task	Use the + buttons on the canvas
Add an action, condition or route	Add action / Add condition / Add agents route on the toolbar — see Sequences
Connect a task to an agent	Drag a line from the agent to the task
Delete something	Right-click the card → Delete, then confirm

Editing an agent, you set:

Role — who it is, e.g. Customer Support Specialist. You type this yourself; there's no list to choose from. An agent keeps its role for the whole run, and can perform as many steps as you give it.
Goal — what it's trying to achieve.
Backstory (optional) — persona and working style.
Model — which AI model powers it (see Models & LLM connections).
Tools — what it's allowed to use. Ticked tools show as small labels on the agent's card, so you can see at a glance whether a step can reach your customers or your payment records.

Editing a task, you set the description (what to do), the expected output (what "done" looks like), and which agent performs it. Tasks run in order, and each one can see the outputs of the tasks before it. A task with no agent assigned does not run — the canvas marks it Pick an agent, the step is skipped, and the trace says so. It used to be handed to whichever agent happened to be first, which is how the wrong agent ends up writing a customer’s apology.

A task is one of four kinds of step. Actions, conditions and routes are covered in Sequences.

Start from a template

Templates (in the sidebar) are proven setups from the RAiN package catalog — customer support, sales follow-up, marketing content, reports, and more.

Open Templates and pick one.
Click Use template — a full copy lands in your workspace and opens on the canvas.
Rename it, edit the agents' goals for your client's context, and replace the knowledge with theirs.

The template itself is never changed by your edits — clone as many times as you like.

The knowledge base

Open Settings in a project's toolbar to set its knowledge — business facts, menus, price lists, FAQs, policies. If a prompt-built project needs knowledge, the designer may draft a starting point for you; keep it current and your agents stay accurate.

There are two ways to fill it, and they go to the same place:

Type it into the knowledge box.
Upload documents underneath — PDF, Word, CSV, text, Markdown, JSON or XML, up to 10 MB each. The file is read once and stored as searchable passages.

A scan won't work. If the PDF is photographs of pages rather than real text, there's nothing to read and the upload will say so. Export a text PDF instead.

Uploaded files are kept as passages, not as files — there's nothing to download back out, and re-indexing means uploading again. Remove one and its passages go with it.

Knowledge only reaches an agent that has the tool. Give the agent the Knowledge base tool (in its Tools list) and it can search everything above while it works. Each result names the file it came from, so the agent can say "the price list says" rather than just asserting it.

FAQs

The assistant added more than I wanted. Delete the extras on the canvas (right-click → Delete), then ask again more narrowly — e.g. "add ONE task that…". Requests are additive, so cleanup is safe.

Can two agents share a task? A task has one performing agent, but its output flows to every later task — chain tasks to pass work between agents.

How big should a project be? Start small: 1–3 agents and 1–4 tasks covers most real jobs. It's easier to grow a working small project than debug a sprawling one.

Did my canvas changes save? Yes — edits and layout save as you work. If something looks stale, refresh the page.