Agents overview

Mantis’s AI surface is the Composer: a chat panel that reads the space you have open, calls Mantis tools to answer, and can change the map while it does it. Everything else in the View menu’s Agents group either supports the Composer or predates it.

Start here if you are new:

Composer

The AI chat panel, its three modes, tools, citations, and slash commands.

Agent runtimes

Opencode, Hermes, and Claude Code, and why the mode selector stops applying.

Agent Studio and Memories

Build a custom agent with its own knowledge and MCP tools.

Agent workspace

File Browser, Editor, and Terminal for the container the agent works in.

Ansatz

The /ansatz reasoning terminal: claims, evidence, sweeps, and Lean checks.

How the pieces fit

The Composer opens from View → Agents → Composer and is part of the Default layout. Which model you pick in its header decides how a turn runs:

• A Composer model answers inside the Mantis assistant. The mode selector applies, so ask really is read-only, and the agent works through MCP tools such as inspect, search, compare, and the bag and map tools.
• An agent runtime hands the turn to a coding agent in a container. The turn is queued as a background job and streamed back, and the Composer mode is not applied at all.

Whatever a runtime did to that container is visible in the File Browser, Editor, and Terminal panels, which share the same filesystem.

Other panels in the Agents group

The View menu’s Agents group also holds builder and console panels that are documented elsewhere or not yet documented:

• Jarvis Builder, a React Flow workflow builder with live execution visualization. See Jarvis Workflow Builder.
• Agno Workflow Builder, for Agno-native workflows persisted to the database.
• MCP, a Model Context Protocol session manager and tool output console.
• SPHINX, an embedded triage console.

Legacy surfaces

Legacy These panels still ship and still open, but

the Composer replaced what they were for. Their pages are kept under Legacy surfaces in the sidebar.

Panel	Status
MantisGPT	The former name of the Composer. The panel now registers as Composer, so there is nothing separate to open.
Orchestrator	An older agent chat on its own socket. Its whole interface is a textarea, a Narrator button, and Send, and results come back as bags created on your maps. Use the Composer instead.
Narrator	Not a storytelling agent. The panel is the run log and execution graph viewer for Orchestrator runs, opened from the Orchestrator’s Narrator button.
Context	A read-only list of your messages in the legacy chat session, labelled by the bags each message mentions. It holds no preferences and nothing persists across sessions. For what the Composer actually remembers, see Memories.
Suggestions	A command predictor. It ranks the most frequent commands from the last 100 logged commands across all users, not yours. The Composer’s own suggestions are its quick-start pills and follow-up chips.
User Logs	A sortable, date-filterable table of logged user messages and agent commands, with CSV export and journey generation from the selected rows.
Voice Agent	Non-functional. The server’s voice endpoint is disabled, so the panel cannot connect. Dictation lives on the Composer’s microphone button, which uses the browser’s speech recognition and is English only.

There is no multi-agent orchestration layer beyond this. If you are looking for one, the real answers are Composer modes, agent runtimes, and Agent Studio.

Read nextComposerThe page to read if you only read one in this section.