Scheduled triage with Claude Managed Agents

An agent that runs itself

The MCP guide shows how an agent works the triage queue: claim_triage, get_issue, post_analysis, ack_triage. Something still has to start the agent. With Claude Managed Agents that something is a cron schedule on Anthropic's side: a deployment fires a session every hour, the session connects to your Thermite's /mcp, drains what is pending, and stops. Nothing runs on your infrastructure.

Thermite's repository ships the definition under managed-agents/: four resource files and a lockfile, kept in sync with ant apply.

agents/triage.md            the agent: model, your MCP server, the triage prompt
environments/cloud.yaml     a container whose egress is limited to MCP servers
vaults/thermite-demo.yaml   the vault that will hold your oat_ key
deployments/triage.md       the hourly schedule and the per-run spend cap

Note

Thermite never calls a model. The agent is a plain MCP client of your instance, authenticated with an oat_ key like any other. Findings arrive through post_analysis and appear on the issue page; nothing about the agent, its prompt or its billing touches Thermite.

Set it up

Install the Anthropic CLI

bash

brew install anthropics/tap/ant
ant auth login

The login binds the CLI to one organization and workspace; every resource below is created there.

Point the agent at your instance

Copy managed-agents/ into your own repository and change one line in agents/triage.md:

yaml

mcp_servers:
  - type: url
    name: thermite
    url: https://errors.example.com/mcp

Delete claude-lock.json if you copied it — it names Thermite's own resources, and ant apply refuses a lockfile from another workspace.

Create the resources

From the directory that holds the files:

bash

ant apply --dry-run agents environments vaults deployments   # the plan
ant apply agents environments vaults deployments             # create them

The run writes claude-lock.json with each resource's id. Commit it: the next ant apply updates the same resources instead of creating duplicates.

Add the API key

Mint an oat_ key in Settings → API keys, then store it in the vault. The key goes to Anthropic's vault and is injected into the agent's requests at egress; the agent never sees it.

bash

ant beta:vaults:credentials create \
  --vault-id "$(jq -r '.resources["./vaults/thermite-demo.yaml"].id' claude-lock.json)" \
  --display-name "Thermite API key" \
  --auth '{type: static_bearer, mcp_server_url: https://errors.example.com/mcp, token: oat_...}'

The mcp_server_url must match the agent's mcp_servers entry: credentials are matched to servers by URL.

Run it once

bash

ant beta:deployments run \
  --deployment-id "$(jq -r '.resources["./deployments/triage.md"].id' claude-lock.json)"

The run returns a session id. Follow it live with ant beta:sessions:events stream --session-id sesn_..., or open it in the Console. Within a few minutes every pending issue carries an analysis.

What the agent does, and does not do

The prompt in agents/triage.md is the whole behaviour, and it is short enough to read. The agent claims three items at a time under a 15-minute lease, reads each issue once, writes a diagnosis with an honest confidence, and acknowledges the item. It reads human notes before machine findings, and it treats a missed cron monitor as a monitor finding rather than a code bug.

Three tools are switched off on the agent rather than merely discouraged: create_project, setup_project and set_issue_status. Resolving is a decision tied to a shipped release, and a diagnosing agent has not shipped anything.

Tip

Overlapping runs are safe. A run that takes longer than the schedule interval does not cause the next run to diagnose the same issue twice — claim_triage is a lease, and that is what it is for.

Cost

deployments/triage.md carries a hard cap per session (budget, in cents at list price; the shipped file says $3). A run that finds nothing is one tool call and costs a few cents; a run that drains a backlog stops at the cap and the hourly sweep continues where it left off.

Tune the schedule to how fast you want findings. Hourly is a sensible default; every 10 minutes means ~144 mostly-empty runs a day.

Triggers

The schedule is the only trigger Managed Agents offers. There is no inbound webhook on Anthropic's side that starts a session, so reacting to an alert within seconds means something you run holding an Anthropic key, calling POST /v1/deployments/{id}/run when Thermite's alert webhook fires. For most teams the hourly sweep is enough, and it is the part with nothing to operate.

Giving it the repository

The shipped agent diagnoses from what Thermite holds. A deployment can also attach a github_repository resource, which lets the session check out the release that crashed, open a pull request and hand the link back as fix_url — the loop described under Handing back a pull request. The repository credential lives on the Anthropic side, in the deployment or a vault; Thermite still holds no git credential.

Next steps

Connect an agent (MCP)

The tools the agent uses, and the triage loop in detail.

Authentication

What an oat_ key can do, and how to revoke one.