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Agent

The [agent] section. For normative field constraints, see the manifest spec.

Fields

[agent]
name = "osint-investigator"
description = "OSINT people intelligence agent"
version = "0.3.1"
authors = ["ivan <[email protected]>"]
model = "claude-sonnet-4-20250514"
tags = ["osint", "people", "research"]
Field Type Description
name string REQUIRED — MUST match ^[a-z0-9]+(-[a-z0-9]+)*$
description string REQUIRED — <= 1024 chars
version string Semver major.minor.patch only — no pre-release, no build metadata
authors array[string] "name" or "name <email>" format — email MUST contain @
model string Model this agent was designed for — metadata, not a runtime directive
tags array[string] Kebab-case labels for discovery and categorization — each <= 64 chars

version, authors, and model are theta-spec metadata for identification. model signals which model the author had in mind when building this agent — harnesses select their own model at runtime.

Runtime model settings (reasoning effort, multi-model, provider format) belong in [harness.<name>]:

[harness.codex]
model_reasoning_effort = "high"

theta implementation notes

The theta CLI derives name from the directory name, auto-detects authors from git config, and scaffolds version as "0.1.0". model is not scaffolded — set it if you want to signal which model the agent was designed for. See theta CLI docs for details.

Name normalization fallback — when the source directory name normalizes to an empty string (e.g. the directory is --- or contains no ASCII alphanumerics), the CLI scaffolds name = "my-agent". Override with theta init --name <name> when scaffolding from such a directory.

Casting

name and description are embedded as markdown in each harness's system prompt file — name becomes a # heading, description becomes the first paragraph. version, authors, and model are not cast.

Harness System prompt file
Claude Code CLAUDE.md
Codex CLI AGENTS.md
Cursor .cursor/rules/system.md
GitHub Copilot .github/copilot-instructions.md

For ref subagents, the child agent's own model is used in subagent frontmatter (see subagents).