# 2.7 Build your own agents The off-the-shelf agents are a starting point. The larger idea — and the one that makes Orbit a platform rather than a product — is that every user can build their own. Agents in Orbit are not a fixed catalogue handed down and frozen. They are something a team creates, shapes, and owns. A user can build an agent that encodes their own logic — the metrics they always check, the questions they always ask of a new filing, the way they judge whether something matters — and run it across the connected data at a scale no person could manage by hand. The data underneath is common to the whole firm; the agents on top are each user's own. That combination is what makes the platform both shared and personal at the same time. **Building without engineering** Building an agent does not require writing code. The Agent Builder is a visual environment: a user assembles an agent from building blocks, connects them, and sees how the result behaves — the way one might sketch a process on a whiteboard, except that the process then runs. For many needs, a user can simply describe what they want in plain language and have Orbit propose an agent to match, which they then review and adjust. The point is that the people who know the research — analysts, PMs, sector specialists — can build the agents, rather than having to brief an engineering team and wait. **From building blocks to end-to-end workflows** Agents are built up, not bought whole. The smallest building blocks do focused jobs — pull a particular figure, detect a particular kind of change, format a particular output. These combine into larger agents that carry out a complete task, and those in turn can be linked so that the output of one becomes the input to the next. Chained this way, a series of agents can carry a piece of research from end to end — gathering the inputs, doing the analysis, producing the output — running on its own, on a schedule or a trigger, exactly as described in 2.5. A team can start with a single small agent and grow, over time, toward an automated process that runs a meaningful part of its research without manual steps. **Your logic, your views, your workflows** This is where the platform becomes genuinely personal. Two analysts working from the identical Knowledge Base can build entirely different agents over it, each reflecting how they research, what they cover, and what they judge to be important. A sector specialist can encode the signals that matter in their sector; a PM can build a watch that reflects their particular theses; a quant can shape output to feed a model. Each user maintains their own agents, refines them as their thinking evolves, and keeps them as a growing asset — their own method, captured and run at scale. Nothing about this is imposed; the platform supplies the means, and each person builds their own way of working on top of it. For a head of research, this has a further benefit: a team's methods, once held only in individual analysts' heads, become things that can be captured, shared, and run consistently. The way the firm does research can be encoded, applied across the whole coverage universe, and preserved even as people come and go. **Build your logic, not your infrastructure** There is an important distinction in what a team builds here. Building an agent means building *your logic* — your view of what matters and how to assess it. It does not mean building the infrastructure underneath: the connected data, the entity master, the structured and document layers, the orchestration, the choice of models. All of that is already there, maintained for you. This is precisely the line between what is worth a firm's effort and what is not. A firm's edge is in its judgment and its process, and the Agent Builder is where that edge gets expressed and scaled. The data infrastructure beneath it is not where a firm should be spending its time — it is what Orbit provides so the firm can spend its time on the part that is actually its own. This is the same point made in 1.5, seen from the other side. The reason not to build the platform in-house is that the infrastructure is a multi-year data problem with no end. The reason to build *agents* is that your logic is yours, it should be expressed, and Orbit gives you the surface to express it on — without first having to build everything underneath. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. 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