The assistant handles most requests with rules and search. For a request that no rule, no docs page and no decision step can place, a team can switch on a planner model. It is optional. Without it, the assistant says it did not understand the request and lists what it can do.
What it does
The planner reads the words you typed and the list of tools you may use, and picks at most one tool call. That is all. It does not see earlier messages in the conversation, text it retrieved from the docs or your workspace, or any credential.
Whatever it proposes goes through the same checks as a typed command: your role, the arguments, and your approval for anything that changes something. A reply that is not a valid tool call is treated as “not understood”. The planner cannot approve its own proposal.
What the team needs to set up
The team registers a model under the name agent-planner, with the owner’s sign-in. It takes two things:
- A frontier-model API key from a model provider. The key is stored encrypted and is never shown to the assistant.
- A dollar cap. The model is called as the person asking, so the team’s spending caps and the model’s own per-run caps apply. The planner uses one run per team per day, so the cap on that run is the planner’s daily budget. A request the planner cannot take on because of a cap is answered as not understood.
Register it with the model add command, using agent-planner as the alias and setting --max-dollars. If no model is registered under that name, the assistant tells you the planner is not set up.
Issues written back to GitHub
When the assistant creates or edits an issue in a project that sends changes to GitHub, the change is delivered by issue write-back. Delivery works when the GitHub App has Issues: Read and write permission on the repository. If the permission is missing, delivery to GitHub fails and is retried later, so the owner of the GitHub account or organization must grant it in the App’s settings on GitHub. See GitHub issue sync for the modes.
Privacy
The planner sees only the words you typed, with obvious secrets removed, and the names and descriptions of the tools. See Privacy and retention for what is kept and for how long.