First agent

Send your first task to a Jarvis agent and understand how agent delegation works.

Jarvis includes two multi-agent systems — Paperclip and Hermes — each designed for different kinds of work. This guide walks you through choosing the right agent, sending your first task, and reading the response.

Choose your agent

Before sending a task, decide which agent fits your goal:

Agent	Best for
Paperclip	Infrastructure tasks, code generation, system operations
Hermes	Research, writing, reasoning, and synthesis tasks

When in doubt, start with Hermes — it handles general-purpose tasks well and delegates to specialists automatically.

For a full comparison, see Paperclip and Hermes.

Send your first task

1. Confirm the agent API is reachable

   Before sending a task, verify the agent endpoint is up:

   curl https://your-jarvis-host/health \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer your-api-key"
   

   A 200 OK response means you’re ready to go.

2. Send a task to Hermes

   Use curl to submit a task. This example asks Hermes to summarize a concept:

   curl -X POST https://your-jarvis-host/agents/invoke \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer your-api-key" \
     -d '{
       "agent": "hermes",
       "task": "Explain how vector embeddings work in three sentences."
     }'
   

   To use Paperclip instead, change "agent" to "paperclip".

3. Read the agent response

   A successful response looks like this:

   {
     "task_id": "tsk_01j8z4kx9m3rq7v",
     "agent": "hermes",
     "status": "queued",
     "created_at": "2026-04-04T10:22:01Z"
   }
   

   Use the task_id to poll for the result:

   curl https://your-jarvis-host/agents/status/tsk_01j8z4kx9m3rq7v \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer your-api-key"
   

   When the task completes, status changes to completed and a result field contains the agent’s output.

4. Try a longer task

   For more complex work, Paperclip is a better choice — it delegates sub-tasks automatically:

   curl -X POST https://your-jarvis-host/agents/invoke \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer your-api-key" \
     -d '{
       "agent": "paperclip",
       "task": "Check disk usage on all brain mesh nodes and summarize the results."
     }'
   

   Poll GET /agents/status/{id} until status is completed.

Understand agent delegation

When you send a task to Hermes or Paperclip, the agent doesn’t necessarily handle everything itself. Jarvis uses a role-based delegation model:

• CEO — interprets the task and decides which specialists to involve
• CTO — handles technical planning and architecture decisions
• Engineer — executes code generation, system commands, and file operations
• Writer — drafts and refines prose output

You’ll see delegation reflected in the response metadata when sub-agents are involved. This happens automatically — you don’t need to configure it.

Delegation adds a small amount of latency as the orchestrator routes sub-tasks. For simple, single-step tasks, the CEO agent usually handles the request directly without spawning specialists.

Next steps

Agent overview

Understand the full agent architecture and role hierarchy.

API reference

See all available agent endpoints, parameters, and response formats.

MCP tools

Give your agents access to 526+ tools via the MCP ecosystem.

n8n workflows

Trigger agents from automated workflows using n8n.