When to use which
Most work starts as a task. Use something heavier only when the same job keeps coming back.
| Use a… | When | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Task | You need something done once | “Summarise this survey for the leadership team” |
| Skill | You keep explaining how to do a kind of job | “How we write board decks” |
| Automation | The same job should run on its own, on a schedule or when something happens | “Every Monday at 8 am, write the weekly sales summary” |
| Agent | A team needs one helper for one kind of job, with its own setup and access | “Juniper Research Desk” for the sales team |
| Applet | People need a screen to enter or view data, not a document | “A log of property viewings” |
| Temporary chat | A quick question you don’t want to keep | “What’s a good subject line for this email?” |
Plan mode and Goal mode are options on a task, not separate tools. Use Plan mode for big jobs, and Goal mode when the agent should keep going until it reaches a goal.
How one job grows
- Sam asks for a weekly sales summary as a task, and corrects it twice.
- In the third week, Sam writes “How we write the sales summary” as a skill, so the format stays the same.
- In the fourth week, Sam creates an automation that runs every Monday with that skill. By then the result has been right three weeks running.
- When the whole sales team wants summaries of their own, Priya sets up a team agent with the skill, the sales folder and Slack.
- If the team wants to filter the numbers themselves, an applet gives them a screen instead of a document.
Don’t build ahead of need
A task you run once doesn’t need a skill. A skill only one person uses doesn’t need an agent. If nobody needs to enter data, ask for a .xlsx instead of building an applet.
Avoid making a new agent for every job, or you’ll end up with twenty agents nobody can tell apart. Put skills on one agent instead. Skills are quick to write, and they improve every task, automation and agent that uses them.