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Agent versions

Iterate on a live agent safely using drafts, publishing, and rollback.

2 min read

Agents use draft-and-publish versioning so you can iterate on an agent without affecting the users talking to it right now.

Draft vs. live

Every agent has two states at any time:

  • Live version — the one currently serving requests. This is what users see when they pick the agent in chat and what webhooks and delegations call.
  • Draft version — your work in progress. Editing an agent's instructions, knowledge, or tools updates the draft. Nothing users see changes until you publish.

The top-right corner of the agent editor shows which version you're viewing — Draft or Live — and lets you switch between them.

Publishing a draft

When you're happy with the draft, click Publish. Publishing:

  1. Records the previous live version in the version history.
  2. Makes the draft the new live version.
  3. Clears the draft state. Future edits will start a fresh draft.

Any conversation that was mid-reply when you published continues to completion using its original version — nobody sees a mid-turn personality change.

Version history

The version-history dialog shows every published version of the agent, with the author, publish time, and a brief summary of what changed. For each past version you can:

  • Compare — diff its instructions against the current live version.
  • Restore — make it the new draft, which you can then publish.

Rollback

If a published change causes problems — wrong tone, bad answers, broken tool access — open version history, pick the last known-good version, and click Restore then Publish. The rollback is immediate for all new conversations.

File-based agents

Agents defined in TALE_CONFIG_DIR/agents/*.json don't use the UI versioning system — their history is whatever your git repository records. See AI-assisted development for the file-based workflow.

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