Auto-Create Todos from Agent Runs

Add a guideline that teaches your agent to suggest follow-up tasks, then review and manage them from your dashboard.

What You'll Use

Feature	Purpose
Guidelines	Instruct the agent to create todos when it finds action items
Todos	Lightweight task tracking within Pencel
Pulse (To-dos scope)	Review and accept suggested todos

Step 1: Create a Todo Guideline

This guideline teaches the agent to proactively create todos when it discovers things that need human follow-up.

1. Go to Guidelines in the sidebar.
2. Click New Guideline and fill in:

Field	Value
Name	Create todos for action items
Content	When you discover something that requires human follow-up — a decision to make, a person to contact, a deadline approaching, or an issue to investigate — create a todo. Use a clear, actionable title (start with a verb). Set priority to High for time-sensitive items, Medium for important but not urgent, and Low for nice-to-haves. Include enough context in the description that someone can act on it without re-reading the source material.
Activation	Always active
Scope	Workspace (applies to all agents)

INFO

This guideline uses behavioral instruction — it does not enforce a hard rule, but teaches the agent a habit. The agent decides when something qualifies as a follow-up item based on the guideline's criteria.

Step 2: Run a Task That Generates Todos

1. Open the Chat panel and select an agent.
2. Switch to Action Mode.
3. Give the agent something to review. For example, open a report artifact and ask:

"Review this quarterly report and flag anything that needs follow-up."

Or, without an artifact:

"Here are the notes from today's team meeting: (1) The API migration deadline is next Friday. (2) Sarah needs to review the new pricing page before launch. (3) We should consider adding SSO support — a few enterprise prospects asked about it. (4) Server costs increased 40% month-over-month. Flag the action items."

4. The agent creates todos for each actionable item. You'll see tool calls to output_todo in the execution trace.

Step 3: Review Todos on the Dashboard

1. Click Home in the sidebar to open the dashboard.

2. Todo suggestion cards appear in the To-dos scope of Pulse, ready to accept or dismiss.

3. For each suggested todo, you can:

   • Accept — adds it to your todo list
   • Dismiss — removes the suggestion

4. Navigate to the Todos section to see your full list. Each todo shows:

   • Status: Pending → In Progress → Done
   • Priority: High / Medium / Low
   • Source: which agent and run created it

TIP

Todos also appear in the daily summary in the Pulse To-dos scope, so you won't lose track of items even if you don't check them immediately.

Step 4: Combine with Scheduled Workflows

For maximum value, pair this guideline with a scheduled workflow. For example, a workflow that scans your Slack channels every morning will automatically surface action items as todos — no manual review needed.

The guideline applies to all agents in the workspace, so any workflow or chat session can generate todos.

What to Try Next

• Using Todos — Status workflows, priorities, and daily summaries
• Using Pulse — Managing decisions and suggestions in Pulse
• Scheduling Automation — Run workflows on a cron schedule