Work mode

Work mode is for the day-to-day of running agents — chatting with them, watching sessions, attaching skills and KBs, publishing to channels. If you write skills in code, train experts, or run evaluations, flip to Develop mode in the navbar.

Mental model

A Surogate agent is a deployed service at <slug>.cloud.surogate.ai bundling:

A model that thinks
Skills — markdown files telling it how to handle specific request types
Knowledge bases — documents it can search at runtime
MCP servers — connections to external systems (Slack, GitHub, your APIs)
Persona — the agent’s identity, tone, and boundaries. Configure → Identity tab exposes both the short DESCRIPTION field and the full SOUL.md textarea (up to 20,000 characters) in either mode.
Channels — Web (always on), WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Voice, Website widget

The improvement loop:

Run a chat  →  Review the session  →  Mark good/bad  →  Improve the agent  →  Run more chats

Each step has its own chapter:

The Agents page in Work mode, with one card per agent showing status, chat count, attached skills and channels

Chapter	Answers
Run an agent	Open a session, chat, watch the workspace
Review what your agent did	Session detail, quality flags, replay
Improve your agent	Mark sessions, attach skills/KBs, edit persona

Plus shorter chapters: Library (skills, KBs, MCP servers), Channels (Web/WhatsApp/Slack/Telegram/Discord/Teams/Voice/Website + end-user accounts, including self-registration via your own Firebase), Conversation tools (/goal, the Copilot, the inbox), Surogate Desktop (an app that lets the agent work on folders of your computer), Settings, Monetize (charge end users via Stripe Connect, Pro+), Use cases, Reference.

When to flip to Develop mode

Skip to Develop mode when you need to:

Write skills in code instead of just attaching existing ones
Train fine-tuned experts on your traffic
Run benchmark evaluations or build a custom benchmark
Connect a cloud GPU provider
Integrate via the REST API
Self-host on your own cluster

For everything else, you can run a successful agent for months from Work mode alone.