[Agent] Agent Template?

[wangqiang8511]

Hi, I love to use multica and want to make it default for the team to use, I'd like everyone to connect their working pc as runtime provides. And use multica to centralize the skills contraints and agent definition. However, if I am not wrong, current agent definition bind to runtime. I am using separate repo to manage agent template to allow user to create agent use the same definition for different runtimes. Would there an existing feature for this?

[ADanMan]

You're right that an agent is bound to a single runtime, and there's no feature today that lets one agent definition run interchangeably across multiple runtimes.

Schema: agent.runtime_id is NOT NULL with an FK to agent_runtime (server/migrations/004_agent_runtime_loop.up.sql). Every task-enqueue path copies agent.RuntimeID straight onto the created task (e.g. server/internal/service/task.go:1011-1034, and repeated at :1129-1151, :1208-1232, :1327-1380, :1465-1502) and refuses to enqueue if !agent.RuntimeID.Valid ("agent has no runtime"). So an agent is pinned to exactly one agent_runtime row at any given time — there's no pool/broadcast dispatch that would let several runtimes serve one agent.

You can repoint an existing agent to a different runtime after the fact via PUT /api/agents/{id} with runtime_id (server/internal/handler/agent.go:1288, UpdateAgentRequest.RuntimeID), but that's a re-parent operation (moves the one agent to a different machine), not concurrent multi-runtime execution.

What does exist and is runtime-independent: skills. skill is a workspace-scoped table and agent_skill is a plain many-to-many join (server/migrations/008_structured_skills.up.sql:4-29), so the same skill row can be attached to as many agents as you want regardless of which runtime each agent points at. That's the piece you can already centralize.

There's also a curated "Create Agent from Template" flow (GET /api/agent-templates, handler in server/internal/handler/agent_template.go) backed by repo-committed JSON files in server/internal/agenttmpl/templates/*.json (code-reviewer, bug-fixer, etc.). It seeds instructions + imports skills into a new agent in one call. But: (1) these are Anthropic/product-curated personas, not user-authored — server/internal/agenttmpl/types.go's package doc says templates are "intentionally repo-only... No runtime mutation, no admin UI"; there's no way to save your own agent as a reusable template today. (2) It's a one-shot materialization — no persistent link is kept between the created agent and the template, so editing the template later doesn't propagate. (3) runtime_id is still required up front on create (agent_template.go:181-184), so you'd need one agent per teammate/runtime either way.

Practical workaround right now: define your shared skills once in the workspace, then create one agent per teammate (each pointed at that person's own runtime_id), attaching the same skill IDs to each — skill dedup happens automatically (agent_skill insert is ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING, see agent_template.go:539). Note agent also has a UNIQUE(workspace_id, name) constraint (migrations/046_agent_unique_name.up.sql), so each per-person agent needs a distinct name (e.g. suffix with the teammate's name). Instructions currently have to be copy-pasted per agent since there's no live template object to point multiple agents at — that's the gap you're describing, and it isn't built yet.