Roles

A role is the blueprint. An agent is the instance. Roles tell Queen Bee what kind of work to route where.

Every agent in Busy Bee has a role: Developer, Researcher, Designer, Product Manager, QA Engineer, and so on. Roles aren't titles; they're functional definitions that drive routing, default tools, default model tier, and default skills. When Queen Bee scopes a task and needs to pick an agent, the first question is always "what role does this work need?"

What a role defines

When you (or Busy Bee, on your behalf) create a role, you're locking in:

• Description - what kind of work this role handles. Used by Queen Bee for routing.
• Default model & quality tier - Budget (Kimi), Standard (Sonnet), Premium (Opus), or Claude Code. Some roles benefit from higher tiers (Security Analyst, Technical Reviewer); others run perfectly well on Budget (Social Manager, Outbound Writer).
• Default tools - the toolbelt agents of this role get by default. A Developer role includes GitHub tools; a Researcher role includes web search.
• Default skills - reusable playbooks that ship with the role.
• System prompt - the role's voice and operating procedure.

Built-in roles

A non-exhaustive list of what ships out of the box:

• Product Manager - scopes work, breaks down features, writes specs.
• Developer - reads specs, writes code, opens PRs.
• QA Engineer - tests implementations, writes test code, flags regressions.
• Technical Reviewer - reads code for clarity, consistency, and maintainability.
• Security Analyst - catches credential leaks, unsafe inputs, missing auth.
• Designer - produces UI mockups, wireframes, visual concepts.
• Content Writer - long- and short-form copy.
• Researcher - audience research, competitive analysis, source-material pulls.
• Report Writer - structured reports from raw data.
• Social Manager - platform-native social drafts.
• Customer Success - support triage, response drafting, escalation.

Every role has tier variants too, Developer, Developer (Budget), Developer (Standard), Developer (Premium), Developer (Claude Code), so you can pick the right quality/cost trade-off per assignment.

Creating a custom role

Open Admin → Agent Types and click + New role. You'll be asked for:

• Name and description.
• Which model tier to use by default.
• Which tools to grant by default.
• Which skills to attach.
• A system prompt that defines the role's voice and operating procedure.

You can clone an existing role as a starting point. Most custom roles in the wild are specializations of a built-in, "Internal-Tools Developer" (a Developer with extra context about your repos), "Investor Writer" (a Content Writer with your tone guidelines baked in).

When to add a role

Add a role when:

• You're consistently routing the same kind of work to a custom agent and want a clean blueprint to clone.
• You want to share an agent template across your team without re-explaining its config.
• A specialization deserves its own slot - your team will reach for "Internal-Tools Developer" by name.

Don't add a role for one-off jobs; just assign tasks to a generalist instead.

What's next

Roles are the blueprint. Now create the instance, head to Agents.