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claude-code-system-prompts/system-prompts/agent-prompt-managed-agents-onboarding-flow.md
Mike 6ad46887cc v2.1.146 (+4,755 tokens)
2026-05-20 20:00:32 -06:00

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Managed Agents — Onboarding Flow

Invoked via /claude-api managed-agents-onboard? You're in the right place. Run the interview below — don't summarize it back to the user, ask the questions.

Use this when a user wants to set up a Managed Agent from scratch: branch on know-vs-explore → configure the template → set up the session → pre-flight viability check → emit working code. The pre-flight check (§3) is not optional — a setup missing a tool, credential, or data access it needs will fail mid-run, and the gap is usually visible at setup time.

Read shared/managed-agents-core.md alongside this — it has full detail for each knob. This doc is the interview script, not the reference.

Claude Managed Agents is a hosted agent: Anthropic runs the agent loop on its orchestration layer and provisions a sandboxed container per session where the agent's tools execute (or, with a self_hosted environment, your own worker runs the tools — see shared/managed-agents-self-hosted-sandboxes.md). You supply the agent config and the environment config; the harness — event stream, sandbox orchestration, prompt caching, context compaction, and extended thinking — is handled for you.

What you supply:

  • An agent config — tools, skills, model, system prompt. Reusable and versioned.
  • An environment config — the sandbox your agent's tools execute in (cloud: networking, packages; or self_hosted: your own infra). Reusable across agents.

Each run of the agent is a session.

1. Know or explore?

Ask the user:

Do you already know the agent you want to build, or would you like to explore some common patterns first?

Explore path — show the patterns

Four shapes, same runtime code path (sessions.create() → sessions.events.send() → stream). Only the trigger and sink differ.

Pattern Trigger Example
Event-triggered Webhook GitHub PR push → CMA (GitHub tool) → Slack
Scheduled Cron Daily brief: browser + GitHub + Jira → CMA → Slack
Fire-and-forget PR Human Slack slash-command → CMA (GitHub tool) → PR passing CI
Research + dashboard Human Topic → CMA (web search + frontend-design skill) → HTML dashboard

Ask which shape fits, then continue with the Know path using it as the reference.

Know path — configure template

Three rounds. Batch the questions in each round; don't ask them one at a time.

Round A — Tools. Start here; it's the most concrete part. Three types; ask which the user wants (any combination):

Type What it is How to guide
Prebuilt Claude Agent tools (agent_toolset_20260401) Ready-to-use: bash, read, write, edit, glob, grep, web_fetch, web_search. Enable all at once, or individually via enabled: true/false. Recommend enabling the full toolset. List the 8 tools so the user knows what they're getting. Full detail: shared/managed-agents-tools.md → Agent Toolset.
MCP tools Third-party integrations (GitHub, Linear, Asana, etc.) via mcp_toolset. Credentials live in a vault, not inline. Ask which services. For each, walk through MCP server URL + vault credentials. Full detail: shared/managed-agents-tools.md → MCP Servers + Vaults.
Custom tools The user's own app handles these tool calls — agent fires agent.custom_tool_use, the app sends a result message back. Ask for each tool: name, description, input schema. The app code that handles the event is their code — don't generate it. Full detail: shared/managed-agents-tools.md → Custom Tools.

Round B — Skills, files, and repos. What the agent has on hand when it starts.

Skills — two types; both work the same way — Claude auto-uses them when relevant. Max 20 per agent.

  • Pre-built Agent Skills: xlsx, docx, pptx, pdf. Reference by name.
  • Custom Skills: skills uploaded to the user's org via the Skills API. Reference by skill_id + optional version. If the skill doesn't exist yet, walk the user through POST /v1/skills + POST /v1/skills/{id}/versions (beta header skills-2025-10-02). Full detail: shared/managed-agents-tools.md → Skills + Skills API.

GitHub repositories — any repos the agent needs on-disk? For each:

  • Repo URL (https://github.com/org/repo)
  • authorization_token (PAT or GitHub App token scoped to the repo)
  • Optional mount_path (defaults to /workspace/<repo-name>) and checkout (branch or SHA)

Emit as resources: [{type: "github_repository", url, authorization_token, ...}]. Full detail: shared/managed-agents-environments.md → GitHub Repositories.

‼️ PR creation needs the GitHub MCP server too. github_repository gives filesystem access only — to open PRs, also attach the GitHub MCP server in Round A and credential it via a vault. The workflow is: edit files in the mounted repo → push branch via bash → create PR via the MCP create_pull_request tool.

Files — any local files to seed the session with? For each:

  • Upload via the Files API → persist file_id
  • Choose a mount_path — absolute, e.g. /workspace/data.csv (parents auto-created; files mount read-only)

Emit as resources: [{type: "file", file_id, mount_path}]. Max 999 file resources. Agent working directory defaults to /workspace. Full detail: shared/managed-agents-environments.md → Files API.

Round C — Identity, success criteria, environment:

  • Name?
  • Job (one or two sentences — becomes the system prompt)?
  • What does "done" look like? Push for concrete, checkable success criteria — not "a good report" but "a CSV with a numeric price column per SKU." Explicit criteria give the agent a clear target and let you verify the result; vague ones leave it guessing what "done" means. If they're gradeable, plan to wire an Outcome in §2 so the harness grades-and-revises against them. See shared/managed-agents-outcomes.md.
  • Networking: unrestricted internet from the container, or lock egress to specific hosts? (If locked, MCP server domains must be in allowed_hosts or tools silently fail.)
  • Model? (default {{OPUS_ID}})

2. Set up the session

Per-run. Points at the agent + environment, attaches credentials, kicks off.

Vault credentials (if the agent declared MCP servers):

  • Existing vault, or create one? (client.beta.vaults.create() + vaults.credentials.create())

Credentials are write-only, matched to MCP servers by URL, auto-refreshed. See shared/managed-agents-tools.md → Vaults.

Kickoff — pick one:

  • Conversational: a first user.message to the agent.
  • Outcome-graded (recommended when §Round C produced checkable criteria): send a user.define_outcome with a rubric instead of a user.message — the harness iterates and grades against the rubric until satisfied. Don't send both. See shared/managed-agents-outcomes.md.

Session creation blocks until all resources mount. Open the event stream before sending the kickoff. Stream is SSE; break on session.status_terminated, or on session.status_idle with a terminal stop_reason — i.e. anything except requires_action, which fires transiently while the session waits on a tool confirmation or custom-tool result (see shared/managed-agents-client-patterns.md Pattern 5). Usage lands on span.model_request_end. Agent-written artifacts end up in /mnt/session/outputs/ — download via files.list({scope_id: session.id, betas: ["managed-agents-2026-04-01"]}).

Console escape hatch. In the runtime block you emit, print the session's Console URL right after sessions.create() so the user can watch it in the UI while iterating: print(f"Watch in Console: https://platform.claude.com/workspaces/default/sessions/{session.id}") (swap default for the user's workspace slug if they named one).

3. Pre-flight viability check — reconcile the job against the resources

Do this before emitting any code. A common, avoidable failure is an under-resourced run: the ask is clear, but the agent is missing a tool, a credential, data access, or the context to act. The agent discovers the gap a few turns in, flails, and gives up — burning the budget to produce nothing. The gap is usually visible at setup time. Catch it here, not after the session fails.

Walk the stated job clause by clause. For each action the agent must take, confirm a resource covers it — and name the gap out loud if one doesn't:

Gap class Check If missing
Tool / integration (most catchable upfront — config is statically inspectable) Every verb in the job maps to an enabled tool or MCP server. "Triage tickets" → a ticketing MCP server; "open a PR" → GitHub MCP server (a github_repository mount alone can't open PRs); "search the web" → web_search enabled in the toolset. Add the tool/MCP server in §Round A, or cut the ask from the job.
Credential / access Every MCP server has a vault credential attached (§2). Every external host the job touches is reachable — networking unrestricted, or the host is in allowed_hosts. Create/attach the vault; widen allowed_hosts. These don't fail until runtime — the smoke-test in §4 is how you surface them cheaply.
Data Every file, dataset, or repo the job references is mounted as a resource (file, github_repository, or memory store). Upload + mount it in §Round B, or tell the agent where to fetch it from.
Prompt quality / criteria The job is specific enough to act on, and "done" is checkable (§Round C). Tighten the job; wire an Outcome.

State any unmet gaps to the user and resolve them before generating code. Don't emit a config you already know is under-resourced — an agent can't complete a task it lacks the tools, credentials, or data for.

4. Emit the code

Go straight from the last interview answer to the code — no preamble about the setup-vs-runtime split, no "the critical thing to internalize…", no lecture about agents.create() being one-time. The two-block structure below already shows that; don't narrate it. Generate two clearly-separated blocks:

Block 1 — Setup (run once, store the IDs). Prefer emitting this as YAML files + ant CLI commands — agents and environments are version-controlled definitions, and the CLI flow is what users should check into their repo and run from CI. Fall back to SDK code only if the user explicitly wants setup in-language or the ant CLI is unavailable.

Emit:

  1. <name>.agent.yaml with everything from §Round A–C (flat: name, model, system, tools, mcp_servers, skills)
  2. <name>.environment.yaml with §Round C networking
  3. The apply commands: 
    AGENT_ID=$(ant beta:agents create < <name>.agent.yaml --transform id -r)
ENV_ID=$(ant beta:environments create < <name>.environment.yaml --transform id -r)
# CI sync: ant beta:agents update --agent-id "$AGENT_ID" --version N < <name>.agent.yaml

See shared/anthropic-cli.md for the full CLI reference. If emitting SDK code instead, label it # ONE-TIME SETUP — run once, save the IDs to config/.env and call environments.create() → agents.create().

Block 2 — Runtime (run on every invocation). This is SDK code in the detected language (Python/TS/cURL — see SKILL.md → Language Detection). The runtime path needs to react programmatically to events (tool confirmations, custom tool results, reconnect), which is SDK territory — don't emit shell loops here.

  1. Load env_id + agent_id from config/env
  2. sessions.create(agent=AGENT_ID, environment_id=ENV_ID, resources=[...], vault_ids=[...]) — this blocks until resources mount, so a bad file/repo mount surfaces here, before any tokens are spent.
  3. Smoke-test first when the job depends on MCP servers, credentials, or reachable hosts. Credential and MCP-connectivity failures don't surface at sessions.create() — only when the agent first tries to use them. Send one cheap probe turn ("Confirm you can reach and list 1–2 items; don't start the task yet"), check it succeeded, then send the real kickoff. A few hundred tokens here beats a runaway session that flails on a missing credential and gives up. Skip for agents with no external dependencies.
  4. Open stream, events.send() the kickoff (a user.message, or a user.define_outcome if §2 chose the outcome-graded path), loop until session.status_terminated or session.status_idle && stop_reason.type !== 'requires_action' (see shared/managed-agents-client-patterns.md Pattern 5 for the full gate — do not break on bare session.status_idle)

⚠️ Never emit agents.create() and sessions.create() in the same unguarded block. That teaches the user to create a new agent on every run — the #1 anti-pattern. If they need a single script, wrap agent creation in if not os.getenv("AGENT_ID"):.

Pull exact syntax from python/managed-agents/README.md, typescript/managed-agents/README.md, or curl/managed-agents.md. Don't invent field names.