Setting up agent tools

Before you can launch agents from Solo, you need to tell it which tools are available. You do this in Settings → Agents.

Accessing agent settings#

1. Open Settings. The default shortcut is Cmd+, on macOS and Ctrl+, on other platforms; it can be changed or disabled under Settings → Hotkeys.
2. Go to the Agents tab.

You'll find three sections here:

• Names — the app-level Automatic renaming setting.
• Agent tools — the list of launchable agent CLIs.
• Auto-summarization — the optional headless summarizer used for idle summaries.

Built-in and custom tools#

Solo seeds several agent tools out of the box, and you can add your own custom tools on top of those.

The built-in tools are:

• Claude (Claude Code)
• Codex
• Amp
• Gemini (Gemini CLI)
• OpenCode
• Copilot (GitHub Copilot CLI)
• Kimi (Kimi CLI)
• Antigravity (Antigravity CLI)

Custom tools you add yourself are treated as Generic unless Solo recognizes them as one of the tools above.

Solo doesn't install these CLIs for you. You need to have the actual tool installed and available in your shell for Solo to use it. Solo checks whether each tool's CLI is actually installed and working — see Installation health.

Enabling and disabling tools#

Each tool row has an enable toggle. Disabled tools won't appear in agent-picking UIs.

When a tool is saved in auto-detect mode, Solo probes the command with --version and also falls back to known command names such as claude, codex, amp, gemini, opencode, copilot, kimi, and agy.

Editing a tool#

Each tool entry can define:

• Name
• Command
• Default arguments
• Automatic or manual tool type classification
• Prompt mode for generic tools
• Optional headless command for summarization workflows

For the default host installation, the Default arguments field is appended to normal launches. Existing environment-specific installations can retain their own stored command and arguments, so verify those values separately.

The Tool type mode can stay on auto-detect, or you can set it manually to Claude, Codex, Amp, Gemini, OpenCode, Copilot, Kimi, Antigravity, or Generic.

For generic tools, Prompt delivery controls how Solo sends the summarizer prompt to the headless command:

• stdin sends the prompt through standard input.
• Appended as argument writes the summarizer input to a temporary file, then appends an instruction containing that file's path as the final command argument.

Adding custom agent tools#

Use Add tool to create a new entry for any CLI-based agent that works in an interactive terminal session. You can also add the same CLI more than once with different names and default flags—for example, separate Codex presets for everyday work and harder tasks. See Adding custom agents for a complete example.

To make sure Solo can find your tools, your shell environment needs to be loaded correctly. See Shell environment loading for details.