Instruction

You can customize your agent's behavior by providing instructions that define what it should do and how it should work.

Instructions

The instructions field in vm0.yaml specifies a file containing natural language instructions for your agent:

version: "1.0"

agents:
  my-agent:
    provider: claude-code
    instructions: AGENTS.md

The instructions file becomes part of the agent's system prompt:

• Claude Code - Loaded as ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md
• Codex - Loaded as ~/.codex/AGENTS.md

Writing Instructions

Use natural language to define workflows, rules, and behaviors. Your agent will follow these instructions when executing tasks.

Some workflows require specific SaaS API integrations. See Skill for available integrations. If a SaaS API requires authentication tokens, see Environment Variable for how to pass secrets securely.

Example: Daily News Summary

# Daily News Agent

You are a news summarization agent.

## Workflow

1. Fetch today's top stories from Hacker News
2. Summarize the key points of each story
3. Send a digest email to the user

## Rules

- Focus on technology and startup news
- Keep summaries concise (2-3 sentences each)
- Include links to original articles

Example: Team Communication Tracker

# Slack to Notion Agent

You help track team communications.

## Workflow

1. Collect today's messages from Slack channels
2. Identify key discussions and decisions
3. Create a summary in Notion

## Output Format

- Group by channel
- Highlight action items
- Tag relevant team members

Publishing Your Agent

After creating or updating your vm0.yaml and instructions file, publish a new version:

vm0 compose vm0.yaml

This uploads the configuration, instructions, and any referenced skills to VM0.

Running Your Agent

Run the latest version of your agent:

vm0 run my-agent "your prompt here"

You can also run a specific version:

vm0 run my-agent:abc123 "your prompt here"