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Tembo Agent Studio

Tasks Inbox

The Tasks Inbox is a shared queue that agents push work into for a human to review. Instead of an agent silently acting (or a result vanishing into a Slack message), it produces an inbox item — a small card with the context you need and one or more actions you can take. You triage the queue; the actions run in the real source system.

How items get there

Section titled “How items get there”

Agents create items with the produce_inbox_item tool (over the tembo-agent-studio MCP connection) or via POST /api/v1/inbox (REST API). A typical surfacing agent lists work in some source (Linear issues, Gmail threads, Dialed tasks…), then produces an item per thing that needs your attention.

Each item carries:

  • a title and context (the raw details to review),
  • a source (rendered as the provider’s logo in the list),
  • an externalRef — the source object’s id, used to dedupe: re-producing the same (source, externalRef) updates the existing item instead of stacking duplicates,
  • an optional url — an Open in <source> ↗ deep link to the underlying Linear issue / Gmail thread / Attio record / Dialed task,
  • optional action buttons (see below).

Well-behaved surfacing agents also cap how many items they leave per source (e.g. “at most 5 unhandled emails”) and treat snoozed items as out of the way — so the queue stays a short, focused worklist rather than a firehose.

Reviewing an item

Section titled “Reviewing an item”

Open an item to see its context, the Open in <source> link, and the actions. How you resolve it depends on what the producing agent attached:

Action buttons (act in the source)

Section titled “Action buttons (act in the source)”

When the agent attached options, the item shows a button per action — and clicking one runs the real action in the source system, then clears the item. Examples from the built-in task agents:

  • Complete — marks a task done in Dialed / Attio / Linear.
  • Send — sends a reply (e.g. a Gmail thread) and leaves it in your inbox.
  • Send and Archive — replies, then archives the thread out of your inbox.
  • Archive — files the thread without replying.

These run on your connection for that provider, so an action can only do what your connection’s scopes allow.

Suggested replies

Section titled “Suggested replies”

Reply-style options come with an editable draft the agent wrote. Edit it to taste, then choose how to send (e.g. Send vs Send and Archive). The text you actually send — and which button you pick — is recorded as feedback.

Free-text items

Section titled “Free-text items”

If the agent attached no buttons, the item shows the agent’s proposed action in an editable box. Correct it and Submit to record the final action, or Dismiss.

Snooze and Dismiss

Section titled “Snooze and Dismiss”

Every active item can be:

  • Snoozed — hidden from the active inbox for a chosen duration, after which it returns automatically. Snoozing also frees a slot, so a capped agent can surface the next item from that source.
  • Dismissed — cleared without acting (for items that have no built-in clear/archive action). Dismiss is terminal: a later agent run will not resurface a dismissed item, even if the source object changes.

Filtering the queue

Section titled “Filtering the queue”

The inbox list supports full-text search, a source filter, a type filter, and status facets — Active, Needs review, Open, Claimed, Snoozed, Done, Dismissed. The sidebar shows a live count of active items (it updates on its own as agents produce work in the background).

Learning from your edits

Section titled “Learning from your edits”

When learning mode is on for an agent (its Learning tab), the gap between what the agent proposed and what you actually did becomes a training signal. TAS batches those corrections on a cadence into a single pull request via the Tembo Coding Agent Platform, so the agent handles more on its own over time. The result is tracked like any other change — see Improvements.

For agent authors

Section titled “For agent authors”

To surface work into the inbox, give your agent the tembo-agent-studio native MCP connection with the produce_inbox_item and list_inbox_items tools, then:

  1. List the work in your source.
  2. Call list_inbox_items(source: "…") and skip items already staged (match on externalRef); respect a per-source cap, counting only unsnoozed active items.
  3. For each new item, produce_inbox_item with itemType, source, externalRef, a deep-link url, a title, the context, and options. To point one item at several things to review (e.g. the top 10 Linear tickets behind a single triage task), pass links: [{ label, url }] — they render as a clickable Links list, separate from the single url source link. Non-http(s) urls are dropped.

An option that runs a source action carries an execute descriptor, e.g. a one-click Complete backed by a native-MCP tool:

options:
  - id: complete
    label: Complete
    kind: oneclick
    recommended: true
    execute:
      provider: native-mcp        # or "composio"
      op: complete_task           # the tool to call on click
      params:
        connectionType: dialed    # the user's connection
        connectionName: default
        toolArgs: { id: "<task-id>" }

A reply option uses kind: reply with a draft, and params.bodyArg names the tool argument that receives the human’s edited text. Composio options can chain a follow-up with params.also (this is how Send and Archive replies, then removes the INBOX label). See Authoring agents and the MCP server reference for the full field list.