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Agents

Every surface in Portals is driven by an agent. This is the agent’s layer — the personas, skills, memory, and attachments that shape how it works for you.

Every AI surface — Ideate, Design, Slides, Motion — is powered by an agent. Out of the box that’s the Portal Agent, and it knows the whole app: how to generate a design, lay out a slide deck, animate a composition, build an artifact. But the agent layer is yours to shape — you can build your own agents, teach the app reusable skills, pin facts it should remember, and hand it real files from your project.

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The AI toolbar

The floating bar at the bottom of the window is the agent’s front door. From left to right:

• Surface tabs — Ideate / Design / Slides (and Motion, when a motion frame is active). These tell the agent what kind of work it’s doing.
• The message field — say what you want. Attachments and skills ride along as chips above the field.
• The / menu — pick a skill (see below).
• Model selector — which model does the thinking.
• The thinking toggle — the brain icon. On = deep reasoning for the big asks; off = fast and direct. Flipping it off is the reliable path for quick vector and SVG work.

Everything you attach or pick here is context the agent sees when you hit send.

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Agents — your personas

Open Agent settings (the agents section, top-left) to meet the agent layer. The Agents pane manages your roster:

• Portal Agent — ships with the app, always present, can’t be deleted. It has every tool enabled and knows the whole app.
• Your agents — create your own with a name, an icon and color (the avatar you’ll see everywhere), a system prompt — your persona instructions, layered on top of the base prompt — and tool toggles for which surfaces it can work on: Design, Motion, Slides, Artifacts.

Switch the active agent from the agent section — your messages, skills, and memory follow whichever agent is live. Delete only your own agents; the Portal Agent stays.

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Skills — reusable instructions

Skills are named, reusable instructions the agent follows when active. Pick one from the / menu in the AI toolbar and it attaches to your message as a chip. There are two kinds, and they’re clearly labeled:

• By Portals — app skills shipped with Portals. They arrive with the app (new ones appear for everyone on update), can’t be edited or deleted — but you can open and read every word of their instructions.
• By you — skills you create in the Skills pane of agent settings. Name, description, and the prompt the agent follows when the skill is active. Fully editable and deletable.

Create one: open Agent settings → Skills → New skill, write the instructions, and it appears in your / menu. A good skill is a trigger plus behavior — e.g. “when the user attaches a file, turn it into a mind map” — not a vague suggestion.

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Project memory

The agent remembers your project. The Project memory pane shows what it knows:

• Pinned facts — add a note any time (“we call the product Portals”, “use the brand purple #854fd1”) and the agent prefetches it before every run.
• Auto-recorded memory — after each generation, key context from the run is recorded automatically, so the agent builds on what it already did instead of re-asking.
• Today’s brief — a card slides up above the toolbar each time you open the app, giving the agent a head start on what you’re working on. Toggle it here.

Memory is per project — each project keeps its own context, and “Clear all” wipes just that project’s notes.

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Attachments — what you can hand the agent

Chips above the message field are the agent’s working context:

• Images — attach a reference image (or several) and the agent designs from it.
• Files — PDFs, text documents, office files. They’re extracted to text at attach time so the agent reads the content, not just the name.
• Project files — use the @ picker to attach a real file from your project folder; the agent reads it at send time.
• Skills — picked from the / menu.
• The canvas itself — select a frame or section and it rides along as a chip, so “iterate this section” targets exactly what you’re looking at.

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The project folder

The most powerful attachment is the whole project. From the composer, choose a folder (native folder picker) to point the agent at your project’s directory — then it can read the real files in your project and work with them directly. You can also start from scratch and attach folders or files as you go.

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Common questions

• “Why can’t I edit a skill?” If it’s labeled By Portals, it ships with the app — read it, but you can’t change it (updates stay consistent for everyone). Duplicate its idea into a By you skill to make your own version.
• “The agent forgot what I told it.” Check Project memory — pinned facts are prefetched every run; anything not pinned and not auto-recorded lives only in that conversation.
• “Where are my skills?” The / menu in the AI toolbar and the Skills pane in Agent settings show the same list — app skills first, then yours.

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Next

The agent works through the app’s surfaces — meet them in AI Surfaces, and see what it can draw in Design Tools. To animate what it builds, Motion is the second half of every artboard.