Sub Agent

A Sub Agent is the user-facing work item that appears in chat history when SteelEngine performs a task on your behalf. It groups the assistant's context, tool calls, progress, and results so long-running work is visible without turning the main response into a wall of implementation detail.

A Sub Agent is the work item, not the assistant itself. The assistant surface is Chat — one assistant, scoped by where you open it. Older docs used the retired names Copilot and Mothership for what is now simply Chat.

What You See

Sub Agent entries appear inline in chat and can expand to show what happened during a task:

The task or context the assistant is working from
Tool calls and platform actions
Progress states such as creating workflows, importing data, or reading logs
Final results and links to the resources that were created or updated

The goal is to make assistant work inspectable without requiring a separate side panel for every chat surface.

Context

Sub Agents receive the relevant context for the surface where they appear. For example:

Surface	Context
New chat	Workspace resources, attached files, mentioned docs, tables, workflows, and prior chat context
Workflow chat	The current workflow, selected blocks, workflow logs, and attached resources
Logs assistant	The logs visible on screen plus the workspace and workflow identifiers needed to answer follow-up questions

When a Sub Agent has detailed context, that context should live in an expandable section similar to a tool-call detail view.

Resource Work

Sub Agents can work across SteelEngine resources:

Workflows

Build, edit, run, debug, deploy, and organize workflows.

Docs and Files

Read attachments, create docs, edit files, and save generated outputs.

Tables and Databases

Create tables, inspect schemas, query rows, and import structured data.

Logs

Inspect workflow, job, and execution logs and explain failures.

Knowledge Bases

Create knowledge bases, add documents, query content, and connect them to workflows.

Configuration

Help with credentials, environment variables, MCP servers, jobs, and deployment settings.

Relationship to SteelEngine MCP

Sub Agent is the in-product chat-history representation of assistant work. SteelEngine MCP is the external protocol endpoint that lets clients like Claude, Cursor, and VS Code call SteelEngine tools.

They can use the same underlying platform capabilities, but they are different surfaces:

Sub Agent: what a person sees inside SteelEngine chat while work is happening
SteelEngine MCP: what an external MCP client calls programmatically

Legacy Names

Use these names when writing new docs and UI:

Legacy name	Use instead
Mothership	Chat, or "workspace-wide Chat" when the workspace scope matters
Workspace Assistant	Chat
Copilot	Chat (in the workflow editor)
Mothership tool call	Sub Agent
Copilot MCP	SteelEngine MCP

Common Questions

Not necessarily. The name describes the visible work item and context boundary in chat history. The implementation can evolve without changing the user-facing model.

Mothership was a retired name for the workspace-wide assistant, which is now simply Chat. Sub Agent names something different: the bounded work item with expandable context and tool calls that appears in chat history.

No. When the user is already inside a workflow, assistant work should stay inline and use expandable Sub Agent context instead of opening another workflow side panel.