Building and Maintaining Automations from Your AI Assistant

There are three ways to build an automation in StackJack: the advanced builder in the portal, the chat assistant, and your own connected AI assistant through StackJack's MCP tools. They now build and…

Written By Christopher Scaminaci

Last updated 6 days ago

There are three ways to build an automation in StackJack: the advanced builder in the portal, the chat assistant, and your own connected AI assistant through StackJack's MCP tools. They now build and maintain the same things. Anything the portal builder can set, the other two can set too.

From your connected AI assistant

Editing a live automation, not only a draft

stackjack_update_agent_draft keeps its name, and it now edits a live automation as well as an unfinished draft. You no longer have to stage a copy, test it, and deploy it over the original just to change a schedule.

Four transitions are still handled by one tool each, so two tools can never disagree about the same switch:

What you want to change	The tool that does it
Activate, deactivate, promote out of dry run, demote, resync	`stackjack_set_agent_lifecycle`
Accept the destructive-action or production acknowledgment	`stackjack_accept_agent_consent`
Everything else about the configuration	`stackjack_update_agent_draft`

If you send an activation or dry-run change to the update tool, it refuses and names the tool that owns it.

triggerConfig and the tool set are replaced wholesale, not merged. When you send either one, send it complete. Changing a cron and leaving out the smart filter you had removes the filter.

Eight new tools for the parts that were portal-only

Tool	What it is for
`stackjack_get_agent_definition`	Read one document at a time: the fixed start and finish steps, the tool chains, the trigger configuration, the tool policy, the version list, or the difference between two versions.
`stackjack_set_agent_definition`	Write the fixed-steps document or the tool-chains document. It answers with what it accepted — size, checksum, whether an acknowledgment was cleared — and never echoes the document back.
`stackjack_describe_agent_schema`	The authoring contract, with worked examples: step kinds including decision steps, the `{{…}}` value grammar, tool chains, tool policy modes, trigger configuration including a smart filter, and the decision question model. Read this before writing a document by hand.
`stackjack_inspect_agent`	Recent activity: webhook deliveries, smart-filter judgements, a run's decision steps, lifecycle history, the schedule, a tool-trim preview, proposed tool grants, and runs.
`stackjack_apply_agent_maintenance`	Restore a version, apply a tool trim, re-register a schedule, rotate the webhook secret, archive, or accept a proposed grant. Every action echoes a phrase StackJack computes, so you confirm the specific action rather than a generic yes.
`stackjack_control_agent_run`	Cancel a run, or approve or deny a call it paused on.
`stackjack_manage_agent_templates`	List, read and install automation templates.
`stackjack_manage_agent_memory`	List, read, redact or delete an automation's memory.

stackjack_manage_agent_knowledge also gained three verbs: re-fetch a knowledge source, attach a file directly, and edit a source in place (a text source's name and text, a URL source's name and address, a file source's name only).

You will not see the new tools until your connection is re-granted. A connection whose grant was a hand-picked subset of tools keeps exactly the tools it was granted. Open the endpoint's grant page in the portal and grant the new ones, then refresh your assistant's tool list.

A person has to be behind the change

Every mutating call from an assistant is refused unless StackJack can resolve the signed-in person making it. A machine-only client — one created by an administrator with nobody bound to it — can read, and cannot change an automation at all. The person it resolves then passes exactly the same permission checks a portal save would apply, and the audit record shows both the person and the fact that a machine client carried the change.

What is deliberately held back

A rotate tells you it rotated and nothing else. The new webhook secrets are never returned to an assistant; read them in the portal.
A restore answers with the same curated summary any other write does, never the automation's raw stored record.
Approving or denying a paused call has no confirmation phrase. It is contained differently: the claim on that paused call can only be taken once, the approval is single-use, and the decision log records that a machine client answered it and which one. Approve from an assistant only if you would have approved it in the portal.

The acknowledgment is re-asked when the write steps change

If an automation has fixed steps that write to your systems, someone should acknowledge them. Adding, removing or moving a write step — or any step above one — or changing its tool withdraws that acknowledgment, on every lane, whether the change came from the portal, the chat assistant or your own assistant. Pointing one of its values at an option a decision step picked, or changing that decision's options, withdraws it too. Changing a write step's fixed value, or which value from the trigger it uses, does not. The response says so in plain words.

No lane refuses to deploy an automation without the acknowledgment: it is a warning. But a step whose tool StackJack marks as destructive does not run until someone acknowledges the new list, and on some connectors that mark covers creating or updating a record, such as adding a ticket note, not only deleting something.

A run that was queued before the write steps changed, and starts after the new list was acknowledged, does not carry out any of its steps that change something, destructive or not, because the approval covers the new list and the run follows the older one. The next run uses the new list.

Two things follow that are worth knowing:

Acknowledging is not a one-time formality. The phrase you confirm names how many destructive tools and how many write steps the acknowledgment covers, so it is always about the list in front of you.
An acknowledgment for an automation that has no write steps is not withdrawn by an edit that adds none.

From the chat assistant in the portal

Edit with the assistant on an automation's detail page opens the chat builder against that automation instead of a blank one. It loads the automation as it stands, you describe the change in conversation, and you finish in the builder's own Save — the same save the advanced builder uses, against the same automation.

Your knowledge survives the edit. Core knowledge and knowledge sources are loaded with the rest and saved back untouched unless you change them. If StackJack cannot read an automation's knowledge, the edit lane refuses to open rather than opening with it blank — the advanced builder refuses the same automation for the same reason.
Knowledge sources are added, changed or removed only when you say so. Asking for a new runbook or link adds it and leaves the others alone. Asking to change one changes that source in place and keeps it the same source: a text source can get a new name or new text, a link a new name or a new address (read again at once, on the same refresh schedule), and an uploaded file a new name only — to replace a file's contents, remove it and attach the new file in the advanced builder. A source is removed only when you ask for that source to be removed. If the assistant names a source StackJack cannot match to exactly one attached source, nothing is changed for it and the page tells you so.
The assistant can author fixed steps, including decision steps, through the same editor the advanced builder uses.
Removing something has to be said. The assistant treats silence as "leave it alone", so say "remove the schedule" rather than describing the automation without one.
The destructive acknowledgment is yours, not the assistant's. The tick sits beside the conversation and the model can never set it for you.
Four more settings can be set in the conversation. Test mode, recording the automation's runs, requiring a passing evaluation before a staging copy is deployed over it, and skipping a repeated webhook delivery. The last three can be set while you create an automation and while you edit one. Test mode can be changed only while you edit, because a new automation always starts in test mode. When you edit, only the settings you ask to change are saved, so a change someone made on the automation page in the meantime is kept.
- Test mode changes right after your changes are saved. Before you save, the panel says so in one line — that saving will also switch the automation live, or pause it to dry run. If StackJack cannot take the automation out of test mode, your other changes are still saved and the confirmation says why. If a knowledge source could not be attached, the automation is not taken live: fix the source and save again.
- Recording keeps real tool calls and your customers' data, so the assistant asks with the same consent sentence the automation page shows, and recording is turned on only when you pick Yes on that question yourself. Typing "yes" is not enough. Until you pick Yes, the panel says that recording will stay off, before you save and again after. Turning recording off needs no question.

What no lane can do

One thing is missing from every lane, the portal included, and this is not an assistant limitation:

Evaluations. No lane browses fixtures, creates scenarios or launches evaluation runs.

Still need help? Ask the team