Recipes

A recipe is the executable definition of what an agent does — the logic the harness walks at runtime. You shape it in the dashboard by talking through what you want, see the result as a visual graph, and try the draft in a sandbox before promoting it to production.

Author by conversation

Open an agent's Recipe tab. The left pane is a build conversation — describe what the agent should do and Levain produces the recipe in response. Push back when the result drifts, ask for changes when the spec needs sharpening, treat it the way you'd treat a working session with a teammate. Each round produces a new draft you can try.

The right-hand panel keeps the current draft visible while you talk:

• Spec — the product spec Levain is working from.
• Graph — the nodes and edges the agent will walk at runtime.
• State — the data shape that flows through the graph.
• Nodes — the generated source and prompt files behind each node.

Click any node in the graph to highlight its neighbours. The graph is a visualisation of the current draft — edits happen through the conversation on the left.

Try it in the sandbox

The Sandbox tab is the agent's playground. It runs the draft against real inputs, with the same execution model as production but cheaper lifecycle: reset whenever you want a clean slate, iterate without publishing. Any files the agent produces along the way appear in the sandbox conversation as it works.

The sandbox uses the sandbox primitive under the hood, so what you see here is what you'll get in production. The only difference is scope: sandbox sessions are scratch space, production runs are durable.

Promote to production

When the draft behaves the way you want, promote it: create a new version and mark it active. Runs going through your agent immediately start hitting the new logic, with no client changes. The Agents guide covers the version lifecycle in detail.

After a real run

Production runs land in the Runs tab. The run detail page shows status, the LLM requests the agent issued, the cost breakdown, and any artifacts it produced — everything you need to understand what happened on a specific run.

Next

• The Harness primitive covers how the recipe runs once it leaves draft.
• The Sandboxes primitive covers the isolation guarantees the sandbox tab inherits.