How your agent and Syndcast's agents work together

You need a channel. To connect an external agent you must be the channel's owner. See Connect your agent.

Each of Syndcast's agents works at one level of your channel:

• The channel agent plans work across the channel and starts a project agent for each project the work needs. It does not edit timelines itself.
• The project agent works inside one project. It can make variants of a piece and start a content agent for each piece.
• The content agent edits the timeline of one piece. It writes voice and captions and hands skeleton clips to clip agents.
• A clip agent makes one clip: a picture, a voice line, music, a sound effect, a code clip or a sequence.

You brief the channel agent and the project agent in their Agent tab. In the workspace you talk to them in the AI chat. See Work with agents.

An external agent is your own AI assistant. It runs in its own app, not in Syndcast. It connects through MCP with a token from Channel Settings → Agents → Agent Access.

It can do only what its token allows:

• Role: Owner, Editor or Viewer. The token never has more access than you. If your own role in the channel goes down, the token's role goes down with it.
• Autonomy: how much it does without asking you.
• Credit budget: the credits it may spend on Autopilot.
• Scope: the whole channel, one project or one piece.
• What this agent may do: the switches you turn on.

In the workspace, its work shows as External agent (MCP).

An external agent with the Owner or Editor role can brief the channel, project or content agent, the same way you write a brief in the Agent tab. The work becomes a task in the channel's Agent tab, and the task pays for its model's tokens as it runs. The balance must hold a credit for it to start, and that credit is not spent.

A briefed task never gets more than the token that asked for it:

• It must be inside the token's scope.
• Syndcast's agent works with an editor's access at most, and only with switches the token also has.
• It runs on Autopilot only if the token has the Owner role, and only while the token is active and has budget left.

Your external agent follows the task and reads its result when it is done. It can stop work it started.

An external agent with the Owner or Editor role can make a helper token for another agent, for example a second assistant that takes part of the job.

• A helper never has more than its parent. Its role, scope, autonomy and switches match the parent's or stay below them.
• A helper lasts 24 hours at most, and never longer than its parent.
• What a helper spends counts against its parent's credit budget.
• A helper can make its own helper, up to eight levels deep.

Making a helper needs no yes from you, unless your channel's rules ask for one. Helpers show in your Agent Access list, and you can revoke them there.

Today a token on Assist cannot brief Syndcast's agents or make a helper: the request waits for a yes that has nowhere to show. Use Standard or Autopilot for a token that hands work on.

Autonomy decides how much an agent does alone: Assist asks before each change, Standard follows your channel's rules, and Autopilot goes ahead on its own. Your channel's rules still win over Autopilot.

Some actions need a person in every mode, whichever agent asks:

• Spending money and changing billing.
• Publishing. You approve a publish on the piece's Publish tab.
• Deleting, and other changes that cannot be undone. On Autopilot, a change Syndcast cannot prove it can undo also waits for you.
• Changing access: inviting or removing members, changing roles, raising autonomy, giving a helper token more access and creating a channel.
• Letting a stuck task go on. Only a person's answer releases it.

Syndcast's agents cannot make tokens or message your external agent. Your external agent can answer questions addressed to its own token, but it cannot release a stuck task.

What waits for you shows in three places:

• The Waiting for your yes card at the top of the channel's Agent tab.
• The Agents button with the small spider icon at the top of the page. It counts what waits for you and opens Agent activity.
• A card in the workspace's AI chat.

A yes lasts 15 minutes by default. In that time the agent repeats the same action and it goes through. A request you do not answer stays open for 24 hours.

• Syndcast's agents: in the workspace's AI chat, the To: line shows Channel › Project › Piece. Press a level to move the chat to that agent. To give a bigger job, write a brief in the Agent tab.
• Your external agent: talk to it in its own app. Syndcast has no box to message it. When you answer a request it made, the answer reaches it the next time it checks Syndcast.

To watch an agent work, open the Agents button. It lists every agent working now, yours and Syndcast's. In the workspace you see this project's agents first, then the rest of the channel. On other pages you see the whole channel, grouped by project.

• Press an agent to follow it. The editor opens the piece it is working on and goes with it. Its line says Following.
• Press another agent to follow that one instead.
• Press the agent you follow again to stop following.
• Switch on Follow without choosing: you follow the agent on the piece you are looking at, or else the one that changed something most recently.

While you follow, picking a piece in the content picker follows the agent working on it. If no agent is on that piece, Follow pauses there. All agent activity at the bottom opens the full list, with what waits for you.

Revoking a token in Agent Access cuts it off at once, with every helper it made.