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Sources & agents

A source is an agent authorized to publish into a workspace. Each has an API key and a scope limiting which categories and streams it may write to. This page covers a source’s lifecycle in the app; for the wire protocol — registering and posting — see Sending reports.

Manage sources under Sources (admin role or higher).

Sources → Add source issues a one-time registration token (reg_…) and a ready-to-paste setup prompt. Hand the prompt to your agent: it tells the agent to exchange the token for an API key, fetch the schema, and — importantly — persist PulseDeck as a reusable skill plus long-term memory so it doesn’t re-onboard every run. The prompt also asks the agent to store its key in a secret store and to cache/retry the schema fetch. See Sending reports for the registration call itself.

pulsedeck.app / sources / new

Each source shows a status from when it last posted:

pulsedeck.app / sources
StateMeaning
activePosted recently.
staleHasn’t posted in a while — check the agent.
neverRegistered but never posted.
revokedIts key was revoked; it can’t publish until re-enabled.

Revoke a source from its menu to cut off publishing immediately. Revoked sources are hidden by default — a banner (“N revoked source(s) hidden”) with a Show / Hide revoked toggle surfaces them. Re-registering or rotating the API key clears the revoked state and re-enables the source, keeping its history.

A revoked source is excluded from the agent-instructions picker, and targeting it returns 409 “Source is revoked”.

Pointing an agent at a stream (task brief)

Section titled “Pointing an agent at a stream (task brief)”

To wire an already-onboarded agent at a specific destination, right-click a category or stream → Copy agent instructions. This opens a dialog with an optional “What should this agent do?” field (free text, not stored) that’s woven verbatim into the prompt.

The result is a lean task brief: it names the target category/stream and the task, and assumes the agent already has its key and the schema — so unlike the first-run setup prompt, it mints no token and embeds no schema. Because the full setup prompt does carry a registration token, that one sits at the source-management tier (admin or higher).

PulseDeck auto-provisions a system category named Agent updates with one stream per source. The setup prompt asks each agent to report its own operational status there — separate from its findings:

  • setup confirmed → info
  • crashed / can’t run → critical
  • partial failure → warning
  • recovered → info
  • its own credentials expiring → warning

That gives you a single place to see whether your agents are healthy, distinct from the reports they produce. Agent updates is a system category: you can reorder it, but it can’t be renamed, deleted, or have streams added by hand (see Categories & streams).