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Most projects you build in Genie have a UI — pages someone opens and clicks around in. A Genie Agent is different: it’s a small backend automation with no screen of its own. You give it a typed input, it runs a short sequence of steps, and it returns a typed output. Think “when this webhook fires, look something up in the database, ask the AI to draft a reply, and post it somewhere” — without needing to run your own server for it.
Genie Agents live in your workspace, not inside a single project — though one can be bound to one of your projects when it needs that project’s own database or custom backend code. See Workspaces overview. You’ll also see them called “workflows” in the sidebar’s URL and in a few developer-facing spots — same feature, same data, just the one name a person reads and the other a link uses.

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What a Genie Agent is

A Genie Agent is a short sequence of steps. Each step does one thing, and a later step can use an earlier step’s result — for example, the AI step can use the email address the database step just looked up. You don’t wire this up by hand: Genie figures out the order automatically from what you type. Seven kinds of step are available today:
Genie as a built-in connected app means a step can do anything Genie AI itself can do in chat — create a project, send a follow-up prompt, change a workspace setting — as part of an automation, with no credentials to connect. A step can only reach what the member who owns the agent could reach by asking Genie AI directly.
Need something none of these cover on their own? Reach for an edge function step — it runs real code, so it can do anything a custom backend function can do.

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Two ways to start one

1

Create it on the page

Open Workspace → Genie Agents and click New agent. Give it a name, a one-line description of what it’s for, and its first step — that’s enough to land you straight in the visual editor, where you build out the rest. No conversation with Genie AI required to get started.
2

Or describe it to Genie AI

Tell the workspace AI what you want, the same way you’d ask for anything else in Genie:
  • “When a new row appears in my orders table, look up the customer’s email and send them a thank-you note”
  • “Every hour, check my signups table for anything new and post a summary to my Slack webhook”
  • “Add a step that drafts a reply with AI before it sends the webhook”
Genie AI builds and edits the sequence of steps for you, and can run a preview first — a dry run that shows you what each step would do with no real side effects: no email actually sent, no request actually made, no query actually run. Use it (or ask Genie to use it) to check a new or changed agent before you save it for real.

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The visual editor

Select an agent from the Genie Agents page to reach its editor — a canvas showing every step and how they connect. You can connect two steps by clicking one step’s output and then the step that should use it, rename a step, or remove one. To use an earlier step’s output inside a field — an AI prompt, a database query, a URL — click the + next to the field’s label. A nested picker lets you drill into a step and pick exactly the value you want, which then appears as a chip right inside the field, wherever you placed it. Click a chip to swap it for a different value, or choose Write it myself to edit the raw text directly.
There’s only ever one agent behind the scenes, not two competing copies. Whatever you change on the canvas, Genie AI sees the next time you talk to it — and whatever Genie AI changes, the canvas reflects the next time you open it.

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Testing an agent

Before you commit to a change, you can run a real test to see exactly what an agent — or just one step of it — actually does.
  • Test run — starts a real run of your last saved version and paints live status on every step’s card as it goes: waiting, running, done, or failed, along with the value each step produced. This uses your real data and connected apps, and spends any credits it normally would — it isn’t a simulation. Save your changes first; a test run always uses the saved version.
  • Test this step — test a single Connected app step on its own, without saving or running the rest of the flow. Genie fills in realistic example values for anything the step would normally get from an earlier step, so the test is likely to succeed on the first try. Because it’s a real call, a step that writes data will actually write it.
  • Ask Genie AI to fix it — if a step’s test fails, hand the failure to Genie AI with one click. Genie sees the tool that failed, the connected app’s own error, and exactly what was sent, and proposes a fix.
Genie AI can test a step on your behalf too — just ask it to test a step while you’re describing changes to your agent in chat.

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Managing an agent

The Genie Agents page lists every agent in your workspace — as cards or as a table, whichever you’d rather browse (switch between them from the view toggle; your choice is remembered). Each agent’s row menu (⋯) gives you:
  • Rename — change its display name. This never changes its underlying identifier, so any published tool or webhook URL built on it keeps working.
  • Pause / Resume — pause stops it from starting any new run (on a schedule, a webhook, or another agent calling it) until you resume it; it never interrupts a run already in progress.
  • Recent runs — see its run history and what happened on each one.
  • Delete — permanently removes the agent, every version of it, and its whole run history. This can’t be undone — pause it instead if you just want it to stop.

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Triggers

An agent doesn’t only run when you ask it to in chat. You can set it up to start on its own:
  • On a schedule — the same idea as scheduled jobs: “run this every night at 2am.”
  • On an incoming webhook — give an external service (like a form tool or a payment provider) a URL to call, and the agent runs when a request arrives.
  • Manually — run it yourself, or have Genie AI run it, on demand.
An agent can hold more than one trigger at once — nightly and reachable by webhook, for example.
Ask Genie AI things like “run this every Monday at 9am” or “give me a webhook URL that triggers this agent” — the same conversation that builds it also sets up how it starts.

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Secrets stay out of the flow

If a step needs an API key or another credential — an Authorization header for a webhook, say — it’s stored securely, the same way project secrets are, and the step refers to it by name. The credential itself is never pasted into the flow or shown back to you (or to the AI) in plain text.

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Billing

An AI step draws credits the same way sending a message in chat does. Steps that don’t call the AI — a database query, an HTTP request — don’t consume AI credits.

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Limits

  • Up to 25 steps per agent.
  • A scheduled agent is checked for its next run at least every 10 minutes, so schedules finer than that aren’t meaningful — Genie won’t accept one.
  • An agent that calls another agent has a capped composition depth, so one can’t be set up to call itself in a loop through others.

Scheduled jobs

Schedule a deployed edge function to run automatically on a recurring timer.

Genie Cloud database

Learn about the database an agent’s database step queries.

Workspaces overview

Find your way around the workspace and its sidebar.