Question 1

Can I run multiple agents for different jobs?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Provision a fleet of specialist machines from opinionated presets — e.g. Hermes for research/cron, OpenClaw for browser work, Claude Code or Codex for coding. Each preset bundles runtime, skills, MCPs, and system prompts (the same stack vendors ship as single-purpose products like design or research modes). One dashboard supervises every machine: activity, chat, cron, logs, and cost.

Question 2

What is Agent Machines?

Accepted Answer

Agent Machines is the product layer above sandboxes: a control plane that provisions a full persistent agent in one unit — runtime, skills, MCP, integrations, cron, observation, and fleet management — on any substrate. Think OpenRouter for agents and containers: pick Hermes, OpenClaw, Claude Code, or Codex and pick E2B, Sprites.dev, Dedalus Machines, or Vercel Sandbox in one account. Spin up design, news, code, or ops agents from opinionated presets (Hermes, OpenClaw, Claude Code, Codex). Vendor SKUs (e.g. Anthropic design modes) are UI + skills + MCPs + system prompts — we ship that stack composable, one click per specialist, one pane of glass for the fleet. The dashboard supervises the fleet; MCP/CLI (roadmap) lets other agents orchestrate workers programmatically.

Question 3

How is this different from a regular chatbot?

Accepted Answer

A regular chatbot usually stores memory in browser state or a vendor-owned memory layer. Agent Machines persists operational state to a real machine filesystem: chat records, artifacts, USER.md, MEMORY.md, agent sessions, cron schedules, skills, and the runtime venv.

Question 4

Which agents can I run?

Accepted Answer

Hermes, OpenClaw, Claude Code, and Codex are supported. Hermes is the default memory, cron, sessions, and MCP-native runtime. OpenClaw is the computer-use runtime. Claude Code and Codex are task-driven CLIs. All persist state under ~/.agent-machines/.

Question 5

Which providers can host the machine?

Accepted Answer

E2B Sandbox, Sprites.dev, Dedalus Machines, and Vercel Sandbox are live provider implementations. Each exposes provision, exec, public URL, and bootstrap through the same MachineProvider abstraction. Dedalus currently benchmarks best on boot latency (~250ms) and sleep/wake in our harness; E2B, Sprites, and Vercel Sandbox are fully supported alternatives.

Question 6

How do I get my own machine today?

Accepted Answer

Sign in with Clerk, add provider credentials in /dashboard/setup, pick the agent, provider, spec, and model, then provision the machine record. The browser flow creates the provider machine and stores it in your fleet; the reliable agent bootstrap path is still the matching root CLI deploy command until browser-driven bootstrap lands.

Question 7

What tools and skills come pre-installed?

Accepted Answer

The harness ships 161 SKILL.md files, 27 ranked service routes (MCP → CLI → skills per vendor), 39 MCP catalog entries (2 core + 32 bundled + 4 IDE), 24+ closed-loop CLIs, and 9–23 agent-native tools depending on runtime (Hermes, OpenClaw, Claude Code, Codex). The loadout registry — not static marketing copy — is the source of truth.

Question 8

Is Cursor required?

Accepted Answer

No. Cursor is optional delegation for code edits through cursor-bridge and @cursor/sdk. Without CURSOR_API_KEY, the rest of the machine still runs: chat, files, browser automation, closed-loop tools, skills, cron, memory, dashboard polling, artifacts, and provider lifecycle controls.

Question 9

What is ~/.agent-machines?

Accepted Answer

~/.agent-machines is the unified runtime root for Agent Machines. It holds all agent state -- skills, crons, sessions, logs, MEMORY.md, USER.md, config, chats, and artifacts. The repo checkout at /home/machine/agent-machines is used by reload-from-git.sh to sync knowledge from GitHub.

Question 10

What inference providers are supported?

Accepted Answer

Models route through any OpenAI-compatible /v1 endpoint. The CLI defaults to a vendor-agnostic inference URL; override with DEDALUS_CHAT_BASE_URL or configure model.base_url on the machine. The dashboard stores a model slug per machine.

Question 11

What happens when a machine sleeps?

Accepted Answer

On supported providers, sleep pauses compute while preserving the persistent volume. The next wake resumes from disk: app artifacts, agent runtime state, skills, cron schedules, sessions, and the venv remain available.

Question 12

Where does my data live?

Accepted Answer

Provider credentials and gateway bearers live in Clerk private metadata. Machine state lives on the provider machine under /home/machine, with all agent runtime data and app state under ~/.agent-machines. The public client only sees redacted provider and machine status.