Build and run your first workflow

On a fresh installation, Home shows two choices: Guide me through my first project and Explore on my own. Choosing the guide starts it — nothing opens on its own — and it walks you from choosing a task to opening your first result. Choosing Explore on my own takes you straight to the normal Home; the same Guide me through my first project button is still there whenever you want it.

Start with an example or your own task

Choose Try a guided example to turn fictional meeting notes into an action plan, develop an idea into a project brief, or draft an email. Edit the sample details before continuing. Each example has a writer and an editor, with no additional skills or integrations to install. The email example produces a draft; it does not send it.

Choose Start with your own task if you already know what you need. Describe the result and any useful context. After setup, your brief appears in the builder, ready to send. The builder helps you refine the task and create the team.

Both paths continue through the same steps:

1. Connect AI. Choose an account, API connection, or local model. Your selected AI processes the task, and its usage limits or charges apply. Closing connection setup returns you to your project.
2. Review and run. Choose your permission settings and a project folder. Cerevisor saves the workspace before opening it. Cancelling the folder picker keeps your brief intact.
3. Review your team. Example teams are already prepared. For your own task, send the prefilled brief in the builder and review the team it creates. You can edit agents before running.
4. Run my first workflow. The normal setup checks and run confirmation apply. Open the live run to follow progress and respond to requests.
5. Open your result. Once the tracked run succeeds and its final text output is available, the guide opens that output for you. If a run fails or has no final text to show, review the run details instead.

Use Explore on my own or Hide guide to leave the guide. Your project remains available; hiding the guide does not stop a running workflow. You can reopen it from Home. The Learning Experience settings let you turn guidance off or customize its welcome text.

Build a workflow manually

If you prefer to build by hand, connect a provider and follow either path below.

The manual examples cover two paths:

1. Single-agent hello world: a one-agent workflow that produces real output. Five minutes.
2. Two-agent handoff: a researcher passes findings to a writer. Fifteen minutes. The smallest workflow that demonstrates what makes Cerevisor different from a chat window.

You can stop after path 1 if you just want to confirm everything's wired up.

Path 1: Single-agent hello world

Open a blank canvas

From the Home Screen, click Pick the folder to work in. Cerevisor asks you to pick a folder for this workspace (that's where your files and results will live), then opens a fresh canvas with the chat builder ready on the left. You can tell the chat builder the job in plain English and let it draft the team — or close it and build by hand, which is what this page walks through.

If you closed the Home Screen, use Ctrl/Cmd+N to create a new workflow.

Add an agent

Three ways to add an agent, pick the one that feels easiest:

• Drag from the left palette. Open the Agent Palette by clicking its icon on the left edge of the canvas, then drag any role card onto the canvas (or just click a role card to drop it in).
• Right-click the canvas → Add agent.
• Open the Manual Controls menu at the top-left of the canvas and click Add Agent, then pick a role from the menu.

For this hello world, pick Researcher.

Configure it

Click the agent card to select it. Selecting a single agent opens the Agent Config popup automatically.

Set these:

• Name: Quick Researcher
• Instructions: Research the current state of multi-agent AI workflow tools in 2026. Summarize the three most notable platforms, what makes each distinct, and who they're for. Cite sources.
• Output definition: A 300-word summary in markdown with inline source citations.

Leave everything else at defaults. Click Save.

Run it

Click the Run button in the top-right of the canvas.

A confirmation modal shows you the estimated cost and the permissions the workflow will need. Click Run.

The agent card lights up. You'll see streaming output appear in real time. When it finishes, the card shows a green check; click it to see the full output.

That's it. You just ran a multi-agent workflow with one agent.

What just happened? Cerevisor generated a prompt from your configuration, sent it to your default provider, granted the agent the default tools for its role (a Researcher gets read-only tools like read_file, glob, grep, and find_skills), let it call those tools in a loop until it produced the output you defined, then saved everything to ~/.cerevisor/audit-logs/. You can replay this workflow any time by hitting Run again.

Path 2: Two-agent handoff

Now let's chain two agents. The researcher you just built will feed a writer agent that turns the findings into a publishable blog post.

Add a second column

Right-click an empty area to the right of your existing column and choose Add column. Or open the Manual Controls menu at the top-left of the canvas and click Add Wave.

Name it Phase 2: Writing.

Add a writer agent

Drag a Blog post writer role into the new column (or use any of the three add-agent methods from Path 1).

Configure it:

• Name: Blog Writer
• Instructions: Turn the upstream research into a 600-word blog post for cerevisor.com. Match the existing cerevisor.com voice: clear, second-person, no hype. Include a 1-sentence summary at the top.
• Output definition: A markdown blog post, 600 words, with a title and a 1-sentence summary line.

Connect them

Hover over the right edge of Quick Researcher. A handle appears. Click and drag it to the left edge of Blog Writer. A connection line draws between them.

That's a handoff: the writer will read everything the researcher produced before starting.

You can also let Cerevisor auto-connect. With Smart auto-connect enabled (the default), any agent you add to a new column is automatically wired from the previous column's outputs. Manual wires you draw always override auto-connect.

Run

Click the Run button again. This time Cerevisor will tell you it's running two waves:

Wave 1: Quick Researcher
Wave 2: Blog Writer (after Wave 1)

When Wave 1 finishes, Wave 2 starts automatically. The writer's prompt will include the researcher's output as context.

When the run completes, click the writer card to read the blog post.

What to try next

You've covered the core loop. From here, real workflows usually add a few more things:

• Skills. Drag a skill (e.g. recency-research) from the Skills panel onto an agent for a more capable researcher. See Working with Skills.
• Markdown input/output files. Attach spec.md to the writer as an input file so it has context the researcher didn't generate. See Attach markdown files.
• A reviewer agent. Add a third column with a Reviewer role that critiques the blog post and proposes edits. See Connect agents.
• Conditional connections. Branch based on a confidence score (e.g. "if the researcher's confidence is low, send to a senior researcher; otherwise to the writer"). See Control flow.
• Save your workspace. Ctrl/Cmd+S writes a .cerevisor-world file you can re-open, share, or schedule. See File formats.
• Turn on Progressive Mode. Flip the switch at the top of the chat builder and your next message is built and run, step by step, with the cost reported as it goes. See Progressive Mode.

Where to go next

→ Guides → Building Workflows for the full set of things you can do with agents and connections.

You can reopen Guide me through my first project from Home at any time. It resumes an unfinished guide or starts fresh after completion. Choose Reset guide beside it to begin again immediately. Resetting the guide keeps your saved projects, runs, and AI connections.