Creating an Agent

Overview

You create a Rival Agent from the My Tools or the Build/Studio area of the app. The New agent button opens a small modal with some required and optional input fields regarding the agent you want to build. Once you save it, a new agent is built.

Log in to Rival and open the Build page from the left sidebar navigation.
Click the Agent card to manually create the agent, or prompt RivalBot to build one for you.

The modal collects the agent’s basic identity. Some fields are required, others optional.

Name

A unique name for your agent within your organization. Two agents in the same org can’t share a name. Pick something descriptive - Research Bot, Inbox Triage, Customer Q&A - because the name is what teammates will see in the listing.

Description

A short summary of what the agent does. It appears on the agent card and on the published marketplace listing, so write it for the person deciding whether to use the agent.

Instructions

The base instructions that tell the agent how to behave - its job, the steps it should follow, and anything it should always or never do. You can refine these later in Persona & Guardrails.

Theme

Pick an icon and theme for the agent. You can choose from a built-in icon set or upload your own. The icon shows on the agent card in the listing and on the published marketplace listing.

After you click Create

Submitting the modal creates the draft and opens the agent editor at /rival-agent/{orgSlug}/{id}. From there you’ll configure the agent in these sections:

Persona & Guardrails - tone, working style, values, and what the agent is allowed or not allowed to do.
Tools & Memory - attach marketplace tools and upload memory files.
Connectors - integrate third-party platforms like Gmail, Slack, and Google Drive via OAuth.
Sub-agents - create or clone helper agents the parent can delegate to, scoped to this agent.
Rituals - schedule the agent to run on its own.
Trial Chat - test the agent end-to-end before publishing.

Adding sub-agents

While configuring an agent, you can give it sub-agents - helper agents the parent delegates parts of a task to. In the editor’s Sub-agents section you can either:

Create a new sub-agent inline - define its name, instructions, model, tools, and connectors from scratch.
Clone an existing agent - use one of your organization’s agents, or a Marketplace listing, as the starting point.

Either way, the sub-agent is embedded in the parent agent - it’s stored with that agent and scoped to it only. It isn’t a separate, shared agent in your organization, so editing or removing a sub-agent affects only this parent (cloning from an existing agent copies it in; the original agent is left untouched). Sub-agents are limited to one level deep - a sub-agent can’t have sub-agents of its own.

See Sub-agents for how the parent delegates to them during a chat.

When you’re happy with the configuration, see Publishing an Agent.