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Agent Manifest Reference

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The bundled agents

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Entry schema

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Flags

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Capture

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Placeholder substitution

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Flag semantics and traps

• autoApprove applies to the interactive spawn as well as the headless one. A flag that only exists on a headless subcommand — Droid’s --auto is the shipped example, Crush’s --yolo the other — breaks every launch of that agent the moment the user turns Auto on. Droid’s entry therefore ships without autoApprove, and the guard in agentsManifestFile.check.ts rejects a well-meaning “add the yolo flag” edit that would reintroduce it.
• session needs a CLI that accepts an id we supply. A --resume flag that only takes an id the CLI minted itself belongs in capture.resume instead, or nowhere — declaring it under flags.session passes Tempest’s id to a CLI that does not expect it.

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The signed distribution channel

1. The bundled floor. config/agents.json is imported at build time, so the agent list works instantly and offline, even before any network call.
2. The signed remote patch. At startup, src/lib/remoteAgents.ts fetches both agents.json and its detached signature agents.json.minisig from
   https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/tempestai-dev/tempest@main/config/
   
   and verifies the signature in Rust via the verify_minisign command against AGENTS_PUBKEY, the public key bundled in src-tauri/src/lib.rs (the minisign-verify crate; both legacy and prehashed signature formats are accepted). Only after verification is the raw file parsed, the minAppVersion gate applied, and the surviving entries merged by id onto the floor. A new agent added upstream via a PR shows up in existing installs this way — no app release needed.

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Key ceremony and publishing

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The other config files, for contrast

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Validation

• every shipped entry survives sanitization (a dropped entry is an agent that silently never appears);
• agent ids are unique;
• every command is a bare-token regex match, and every name is non-empty;
• each icon resolves either to a bundled key or to a real file in config/agent-icons/ (anything else degrades to the fallback glyph with no error);
• capture patterns compile, and every capture spec carries resume args so it is usable;
• every placeholder is a known one, since a typo reaches the CLI literally;
• modelArgs actually reference {MODEL} and printArgs reference {PROMPT}, so slots that carry a value carry its placeholder;
• downloadUrl is https;
• and Droid’s entry must not declare autoApprove, because its --auto flag is exec-only and would break interactive launches.

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Worked example

{
  "id": "myagent",                 // stable key; also overrides a bundled agent of the same id
  "name": "My Agent",
  "command": "myagent",            // bare token, or a few e.g. "gh copilot"
  "adapter": "cli",                // only "cli" is accepted
  "icon": "myagent.svg",           // a file in config/agent-icons/, or a bundled key
  "mono": true,                    // monochrome icon → inverted in dark mode
  "downloadUrl": "https://…",      // https only; shown when the CLI isn't on PATH
  "clearCommand": "/clear",        // REPL command the Message Queue's clear button sends
  "flags": {
    "session":     ["--session-id", "{UUID}"],  // first run; an id WE supply
    "resume":      ["--resume", "{UUID}"],      // resuming a stored conversation
    "model":       ["--model", "{MODEL}"],
    "autoApprove": ["--yolo"],                  // applied only when the user's Auto is on
    "print":       ["-p", "{PROMPT}"]           // headless; required for automations
  },
  "capture": {                     // only for agents that print their OWN session id
    "pattern": "([0-9a-f-]{36})",
    "flags": "i",
    "resume": ["-s", "{UUID}"]
  }
}