Specialists
A specialist is a job you can hand work to: a title (Intern, Implementer, Reviewer, Bookkeeper), what it does, the skills it brings, the agent and model it runs on, and how many can work at once. Specialists live in Library → Specialists, the pool your missions will be staffed from. A specialist runs on one of your agents; it doesn't replace it.
The pool starts empty. BattleLab creates nothing for you.
Create one
- Open Library → Specialists and choose New specialist.
- Start from a template (Intern, Implementer, Reviewer, Bookkeeper or Researcher) or from scratch. A template fills in the job: the title, a summary and suggested skills. The agent and the model are always yours to pick.
- Choose the agent and model. For an API client you can also pick an effort level.
- Add skills from your skills library, set the capacity (1 to 8 at once), and save.
Only agents that can load BattleLab's tools can carry skills. The agent list marks the others with "cannot load skills", and the editor won't save a specialist with skills on one of them.
Versions
Saving an existing specialist makes a new version. Older versions never change, so anything that was approved with version 3 keeps version 3. Archiving a specialist hides it from new use; its versions stay readable.
A skill is saved at the version your library has right now. If you edit that skill later, the card says changed in your library. Open the specialist and save it to pick up the new version.
Grades
Every specialist shows a grade: Intern (fast and cheap), Specialist (strong) or Senior (frontier). You never type it: it comes from the specialist's model, through your own map in Settings → Agents → the agent → Model grades.
That map starts empty, because BattleLab can't know how you rate a model. Until you grade a model, specialists on it show Ungraded. A procedure step that asks for a minimum grade can't use an ungraded specialist; a step that asks for any grade can. "Agent default" is never graded, because it isn't one model.
Changing a grade re-grades every specialist on that model at once.
Specialist notes
A specialist keeps its own notes for each project: what it learned working there, separate from the project's shared notes. They live in the project's memory, follow the project's memory switch, and never travel to another project. Open Library → Memory, pick the project, and its specialist notebooks are listed beside its own notes.
Capacity
Each specialist has a capacity: how many of its sessions may run at once. The whole pool has a limit too, set on Library → Specialists (6 by default). Lowering either never stops what is already running: the card shows over capacity, and new sessions wait until some end.
Start a session from one
On New session, pick a specialist under Start from a specialist. Its agent, model and effort are chosen for you, and a note says what comes with it: its skills, read-only, and its notes for this project. A specialist that is at capacity, whose agent can't start here, or that runs on a chat agent is listed but can't be picked. Your choice is kept if you go off to create a project first, as long as the specialist hasn't changed in the meantime.
Change the agent or the model afterwards and the session starts as a plain one, without the specialist.
The session takes one of the specialist's slots while it runs, and gives it back when it ends. Reopening the session later takes a slot again, on the same version and the same model: if the specialist is full by then, or you've archived it, it won't reopen until a slot is free (or you unarchive it). If you changed one of its skills in your library since that version was saved, the start is refused until you save the specialist again.