The Claos mental model

The agents do the work. You manage them. Everything else in the workspace exists to support that.

If you've used a doc tool, a project tracker, or a chat assistant before, you arrived with a mental model from those: a workspace where you do the work and the app helps you organize it. Claos inverts that. The agents are the workers; the rest of the product — projects, tasks, pages, inbox, dashboard — is the scaffolding around their work. This article makes the shift concrete. Once it lands, the rest of the help center makes a lot more sense.

The center is the agent

You don't "use Claos" the way you use a doc tool or a task tracker. You manage a small workforce of AI agents the way you'd manage a team of humans: hire them out of a catalog, give them a Job Title, tell them what to work on, and check the work when it comes back. The product is shaped around that — agents are the unit of work, and most of what you see in the sidebar exists to schedule, run, store, and review the work they produce.

How the pieces connect

Here's what each surface does:

Agents are individual workers. Each has a Job Title, a system prompt, a set of skills and tools, and a chat history. The Agents page is your chat surface — click an agent and talk to it directly.
Teams are captains plus rosters. The Teams page is also a chat surface — you talk to the captain, and the captain delegates across the team's members. Use a team when the ask is bigger than one specialist can handle on their own.
Projects are where agent work runs. A project represents an area of responsibility — "Q3 marketing campaigns," "Customer support inbox." The tasks inside a project are work-orders: one-off or recurring assignments to specific agents.
Schedules make agent work recurring. Open a task assigned to an agent, set its AI Schedule — Frequency, Time, Days — and it runs on its own from then on. A daily morning brief, a weekly status report, an hourly inbox sweep: all of it happens at the task level.
Inbox is your agents' status reports. When an agent finishes a run, a summary lands in the inbox; you read it, click through to the actual output, and either keep it open or archive it.
Knowledge Base is the library of finished work. The pages your agents write — briefs, summaries, reports, drafts — get saved to folders inside the knowledge base, organized by project or topic. You can write your own pages here too.
Packs sit on top of everything as starter bundles. A pack is a hired team plus the projects and folders they need to work. It's the fastest way to skip the blank-canvas problem.
Integrations are the capability layer — the third-party apps your agents are allowed to act in. Connect Gmail, Slack, Jira, Drive, and so on, and the agents gain a matching set of tools. Without integrations the agents still work; integrations are how their reach extends past the workspace.
Messaging channels are an optional access layer — Slack, Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp links that let you chat with your agents from those platforms instead of the web app. Most people use the web; channels are for when you'd rather work from a chat you already keep open.

The daily rhythm

Most readers settle into the same loop. In the morning, you open the inbox and see what your agents finished overnight — a draft brief, a refreshed status report, a competitive teardown. Around midday, you delegate something new through a team chat or assign a task to a single agent. In the evening, the Home dashboard shows what's still running, what came back, and what needs your attention. That's the "I opened my laptop and the work was already done" feeling, in concrete terms.

What goes where

A quick lookup when you're not sure which surface to use:

If you want to…	Use…
Delegate one ask and get a result back	Chat with an agent on the Agents page
Delegate a multi-part ask	Chat with a team on the Teams page
Set up an area of recurring work	Create a project and assign agents to its tasks
Make work happen on a schedule	Open a task assigned to an agent → set its AI Schedule
Save and organize finished work	Knowledge Base folders
Let an agent act in a third-party app (Gmail, Jira, Drive…)	Settings → Integrations, then toggle the integration on for the agent
Chat with your agents from Slack / Telegram / Discord / WhatsApp	Settings → Channels, then `/claos connect` in the platform

You can also use it as a doc tool or a task tracker

You can use Claos like a doc tool if you want. You can use it like a task tracker too. Both modes work — they're just not the point.

"I just want to write notes." That works. They're pages in the knowledge base; the same mechanics as any doc tool you've used. Most readers won't stop here.
"I just want to track tasks." That works too. Those are tasks inside a project; the same mechanics as any project tracker you've used. Again, most readers won't stop here.
"What you're actually here for" is the third mode: delegating work to agents and seeing it come back finished. The first two are infrastructure; the agents are the point.

Common confusions

Why are agents and teams separate? Agents are individuals; teams are captains plus rosters. You'd ask a copywriter for a single tagline; you'd ask a marketing team for a full campaign brief. Different shape of work, different surface.

Why does the inbox feel like email? Because it's mail from your workforce. Triage what came in, click through what matters, archive what doesn't.

Where do agent outputs actually live? In folders inside the knowledge base, organized by project. The inbox is the notification; the knowledge base is the storage.

Do I need to use packs? No, but most readers should. A pack is a hired team plus the projects they need — going without one means setting up every agent and project by hand.