Agents

Agents

jig ships six built-in agents:

Agent	Kind	What it does
build	primary	Full tool access. The default.
plan	primary	Asks before write, edit, and bash.
explore	subagent	Read-only investigation, spawned via task.
general	subagent	General-purpose, spawned via task.
title, compaction	hidden	Used internally for session titles and compaction.

Primary agents are selectable with jig run --agent, or with tab/shift+tab in the TUI. Subagents are spawned via the task tool by an agent with can_spawn; in the TUI, enter on a subagent's block opens its live transcript in the side column.

Defining agents in TOML

Any [agents.<name>] table overlays a built-in of that name field by field, or defines a brand-new agent:

[agents.explore]
description = "Read-only subagent for investigating the codebase."
mode = "subagent"
model = "haiku"
prompt = "You investigate the codebase; never write files or run commands."
max_steps = 40
can_spawn = false
hidden = false
tools = ["read", "glob", "grep", "skill"]

[agents.explore.permissions]
bash = "deny"

Defining agents in markdown

Agents can also be defined as markdown files with YAML frontmatter (Claude Code's agent format), discovered from, in ascending precedence:

• $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/jig/agents/*.md (global)
• <dir>/.jig/agents/*.md, then <dir>/.claude/agents/*.md, for each directory from the git root down to the current directory (or just the current directory outside a git repo)

The file stem is the agent name; frontmatter fields (description, mode, model, effort, max_steps, can_spawn, hidden, tools, permissions) map onto the same fields as [agents.<name>], and the markdown body is the agent's prompt.

Precedence

An agent definition's precedence (lowest to highest, each overlaying the last field by field) is:

1. built-in
2. global TOML (config.toml's [agents.<name>])
3. global markdown (.../jig/agents/*.md)
4. project TOML (.jig/config.toml's [agents.<name>])
5. project markdown (.jig/agents/*.md and .claude/agents/*.md)

Project agent files are trust-gated like the rest of project config; see Permissions and Trust.