Tools#

A Lens Prism agent has tools and decides when to use them. You don't call tools directly — you talk to the agent, and it reaches for the right tool to get the job done. This page is a tour of what it can reach for. When the agent uses a tool, you can see it: the web UI and terminal UI both show tool calls, with their inputs and outputs, inline in the agent's messages.

Memory#

Manage long-term memory. See Memory for the full picture.

Search — recall past entries by meaning, optionally filtered by category and recency.
Write — record something worth keeping, with a category (observation, action, decision, or event) and an importance score.
Delete — remove entries that are no longer accurate.

Self-management#

The agent can edit its own identity from inside a conversation — this is how "be more concise" or "remember our staging region" take effect. See Agent identity.

Rewrite its Soul, User profile, Memory, Vision, Heartbeat config, or Agent Guide.
Rename itself.
Adjust settings — heartbeat interval, timezone, and chat delivery mode (verbose=true streams every step, verbose=false delivers only the final message).
Clear the bootstrap prompt once first-run onboarding is done.

Scheduling#

Create and manage its own scheduled tasks:

Schedule a task using natural language ("every weekday at 9am") or cron.
List existing tasks.
Delete a task.

Shell#

The agent can act on a real shell — this is what lets it do work rather than only talk about it. By default it works inside a workspace directory (the workspace folder in your install, or /home/node in the container): relative paths resolve from there.

Run a command — execute a shell command and get back stdout, stderr, and the exit code. Commands have a timeout (default about 30 seconds, up to 20 minutes) and output is size-capped so a noisy command can't flood the context.
Read, write, and edit files — read a file (line-numbered), write a file, or make an exact-string edit. These tools reject paths outside the workspace.
Long-running processes — spawn a background process, write to its stdin, drain its stdout and stderr, and kill it with a signal. Useful for servers, watch processes, and interactive tools.

Warning

The file read, write, and edit tools reject paths outside the workspace, but running a command does not — shell_exec can run anything the runtime's OS user is permitted to, including reading paths elsewhere on the machine. The workspace is a default working directory, not a security sandbox; the real boundary is OS filesystem permissions. For a governed boundary around what the agent can reach over the network, run Prism under Lens Agents.

In the published container image, the shell comes with common tooling preinstalled — git, gh, kubectl, aws, jq, yq, and ripgrep — so the agent can do real operational work out of the box.

Skills#

The agent can load an installed skill — a SKILL.md bundle of task-specific instructions — and follow it. It sees each available skill's name and description up front and loads the full instructions on demand when a task matches; you can also list and run skills with the /skills command. Skills come from a global directory and, in the terminal UI, the current repository's .claude/skills.

Claude Code sub-agent#

For larger coding tasks, the agent can hand work to Claude Code running as an autonomous sub-agent in the workspace:

Start a Claude Code task with a prompt, in edit or plan mode, with a turn budget.
Poll the running task for output and completion.

This lets the agent delegate a self-contained engineering job — "refactor this module," "investigate this failing test" — and check back on the result, rather than doing everything in its own turn-by-turn loop.

The agent can deliver a file from its workspace to you as a downloadable attachment (up to 10 MB). That's how files it produces — a report, an export, a generated artifact — reach you in the web UI, terminal UI, or Slack. In the TUI, save them to disk with /save.