Agent Roles

Cerevisor ships with 16 built-in roles plus Custom. A role is mostly a starting point; it sets a few smart defaults (which subagent type to use, which tag color the badge has), then you write the instructions that turn the role into a specific agent for your specific workflow. Roles deliberately have no fixed default model — every new agent starts on auto, and model choice is resolved at run time (see below).

You can also pick Custom and define everything from scratch, or create your own reusable agents via Settings → Agents → Custom Agents.

The full list

Role	Tagline	Default subagent	When to pick it
Researcher	Investigate & discover	explore	Web research, source gathering, market scans, anything that involves crawling and synthesizing external information.
Architect	Design & plan	plan	High-level design decisions, sequencing, breaking a big goal into ordered steps.
Developer	Build & implement	general-purpose	Writing code, generating files, executing concrete build tasks.
Reviewer	Review & validate	explore	Checking another agent's output, looking for bugs, validating against criteria.
Documenter	Document & explain	general-purpose	Producing user docs, READMEs, API references, internal documentation.
Tester	Test & verify	general-purpose	Writing or running tests, verifying invariants, integration testing.
PowerPoint Presentation Builder	Slide decks & narratives	(auto)	Producing slide decks from research or planning output. Pairs well with the pptx skill.
Blog Post Writer	Long-form article drafting	(auto)	Drafting 600-2000 word blog articles. Pairs well with writing skills.
Excel Expert	Spreadsheet modeling expert	(auto)	Building or editing .xlsx financial models, data sheets, dashboards. Pairs with the xlsx skill.
Newsletter Writer	Audience-ready editions	(auto)	Putting together a recurring newsletter from upstream content.
SEO Content Optimizer	Search visibility tuning	(auto)	Editing existing content for search visibility — title tags, headings, keyword fit, snippet structure.
Meeting Notes Summarizer	Decisions & action items	(auto)	Turning raw meeting transcripts into structured summaries with decisions and action items.
Research Brief Writer	Structured research briefs	(auto)	Converting research findings into structured, decision-ready briefs.
Social Media Caption Writer	Caption & hook generation	(auto)	Producing LinkedIn / X / Bluesky captions from longer-form content.
Coach	Integrate & guide	general-purpose	A senior agent that reviews other agents' decisions, mentors the workflow, makes judgment calls.
Situation Reporter	Summarize handoff state	plan	Advisory label: shapes the agent toward composing a structured handoff (default output file: wave-situation.md) as a checkpoint between waves, so downstream agents inherit one canonical read of what's done, what's missing, and what's still unknown. Cerevisor's own wave situation reports are written after every wave, whichever roles are in it. Pairs with the Situational Awareness pillar.
Custom	Define your own	auto	Everything starts blank. You set role description, instructions, model, tools.

"Auto" means what?

For subagent type, auto means: at run time, Cerevisor picks a sensible default based on the agent's instructions. For the model, auto means the agent runs on its provider's configured default model, unless you've turned on smart routing (Settings → Integrations → Smart Routing) or Cerevisor has learned a better fit from your past runs. You can always override per agent.

Subagent types

The four subagent types decide which tools an agent gets by default.

Subagent type	Tool defaults	Best for
explore	Read-only tools: reading, searching and listing files, and finding skills. No write or execute.	Researchers, reviewers, agents that should look at things but not modify the world.
plan	Read tools + thinking modes that produce structured plans.	Architects, planning agents.
bash	Bash execution + file read. No file write.	Agents that run shell commands but shouldn't write files directly.
general-purpose	Full toolset (read, write, edit, bash, web).	Developers, testers, coaches — agents that actually do things.

You can override the default tool set per agent in the Agent Config popup → Allowed tools.

Model preferences

Every new agent starts with its model on Auto. You change it per agent with the Model picker in Agent Config, or by clicking the provider medallion on the agent's card:

Choice	What it means
Auto	The agent uses its provider's default model. With smart routing on, Cerevisor picks a model for the agent before each run instead.
A model from the list	The picker lists the models your account can use on the agent's provider, whichever provider that is: Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, a local Ollama model, and so on. Search the list and pick one to pin it.
A model id you type	Pin an exact model by typing its id. Useful for a model that is not in the list yet.

On the Anthropic provider the picker also has three shortcuts, Haiku, Sonnet and Opus, which pick the current model of that size. Other providers show their own model names in the list.

A new model missing from the list? Press Refresh models in the picker. See Keeping your models current.

Roles never force a model. With smart routing on (Settings → Integrations), each agent set to Auto is matched to a model that suits its task, and Cerevisor learns from your own runs which models work well for you.

Creating a Custom Agent

Two ways:

1. Inline: pick Custom as the role when adding the agent. Configure everything in the Agent Config popup.
2. Saved template: open Settings → Agents → Custom Agents → New. Fill out the template (name, role description, default skills, default model). Save. The template now appears in the agent palette and you can drag it onto any canvas.

Saved custom agent templates sync across all your Cerevisor workflows.

Reordering and hiding roles

Don't use the PowerPoint role? Hide it.

Settings → Agents. Drag to reorder the palette. Toggle visibility per role. Reordering affects the Shift+1–9 / Shift+0 placement shortcuts (Shift+1 = first visible role, Shift+2 = second, etc.).