The AI Agent Tool

The AI Agent tool holds your agent sessions. It is shown automatically when you run Set Up for AI Agent from the Project menu, or you can show it from the Tools menu.

You interact with the agent by typing requests at its prompt. For example, you might ask it to implement a new feature, refactor existing code, write tests, or investigate a bug. The agent reads your source files, makes changes, runs tests, and iterates until the task is done. You review and accept or reject the results.

What a session looks like depends on the agent. Most agents, such as Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, run their own textual user interface in a terminal inside the tool. goose and other agents that speak only the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) talk to Wing over that protocol, and Wing managed the conversation in its own AI session UI. See the AI Agents How-Tos for a list of the supported agents.

Agents with their own interface also have an ACP version, such as Codex ACP, which Wing lists only when the Show ACP Versions of Agents preference is enabled, or while Shift is held with an agent menu open. See Setting Up an AI Agent for details.

Choosing and Configuring an Agent

The project's default agent is set on the AI Agent tab of Project Properties, and the default for new projects on the AI page of Preferences. The tool's Options menu (the ⋯ button) can also change it: New Session lists the agents Wing knows, and choosing one starts a session on it and subsequently uses that agent as the default agent type.

This is a default and nothing else. It decides which agent a new session or a new task queue is started on, and which agent the tool offers to set up when no session is running. Changing it never disturbs a session that is already running, and never moves an existing task queue to another agent: a queue stays on the agent it was created for, because the session it resumes belongs to that agent. To put a queue on a different agent, use the New Session or Resume Session items in the queue's context menu on the Tasks tool's Execute tab, which replace whatever session the queue has.

The agents work out of the box once you have signed into them, either outside of Wing or in a session. Some agents ask you to sign in when they start; for the others, use Sign In to <Agent> in the tool's Options menu. For goose and other ACP agents, you can instead use Configure Agents... in the Options menu to create a named configuration that holds credentials or starts a custom agent. Configured agents are listed under Custom Agents in the menus that choose agents.

Reviewing Changes

When the agent is idle and has changes ready to review, a Review button is enabled on the tool's row. Clicking it starts a review in Wing, opening a diff view where you can:

Navigate between changed files and individual hunks
Add comments on specific hunks to request adjustments
Revert individual hunks you don't want to keep
Use the toolbar to approve the changes or request more work

With Tasks integration enabled (the default), the session is bound to a task queue, and the button is enabled once that queue has a task awaiting review on the Tasks tool's Review tab. The review is scoped to just the files that queue's tasks changed -- clicking the button is the same as Start Review on that queue. A diff/merge dropdown appears beside the button listing those files, each with options to view changes or open the file (the same control as the queue header on the Review tab).

When Tasks integration is disabled from the Options menu, the session has no queue and Wing does not track which files it changed, so the button instead appears whenever the working copy has uncommitted changes and reviews all of them; the diff/merge dropdown is not shown.

If you approve the review, the agent commits the changes. If you request more work, it addresses your comments and can start a new review. During an active review, the Review button remains visible but is disabled.

Sessions

Sessions are bound to a working directory and persist across restarts: Wing remembers which conversation each session was in, along with which agent it belongs to, and resumes it the next time the tool is shown. A session's prompt history comes back with it.

The session selector at the top of the tool lists every session the tool holds, including its agent type and a link to its queue in the Tasks tool.

The Options menu provides the following session management commands:

New <Agent> Session -- Add another session on the agent this project uses.
New Session -- Start one on another agent, picked from the submenu. That agent becomes the project's, so the item above offers it next time.
Resume <Agent> Session -- Reopen one of this agent's earlier conversations, picked from the list it reports.
Resume Session -- The same for another agent, picked from the submenu. Only agents this project is set up for are listed, since there is nothing to resume on the others.
Delete Session -- Remove the current session from the tool (after a confirmation).
Interrupt -- Stop the turn in flight without ending the session. Esc (or Ctrl-G in Emacs mode) does the same thing.
Terminate / Restart / Start <Agent> -- Stop, restart, or start the agent in the current session. Use these if an agent crashes or after connection problems. A restarted agent will continue to use the same session.
Sign In to <Agent> -- Run the agent's own sign-in command in the OS Commands tool, for agents that have one.
Set Up Credentials / Edit Configuration <name> -- Give this agent an API key or other credentials, or open the configuration the session is already using.
Configure Agents... -- Arrange named configurations, as described above. It opens the Configure AI Agents window.

An ACP session, which Wing manages in its own AI agent conversation UI, also offers:

Clear Conversation -- Forget the conversation so far and start a new one, as the agent's own /clear does.
Clear Transcript -- Empty the view without touching the conversation.
Copy Transcript -- Put the conversation on the clipboard.
Show / Hide Tool Output -- A finished step shows what it did rather than what it printed; this is the way back to the output.

A session running the agent's own terminal interface instead offers Adjust Colors, Forward Mouse to Subprocess and Disable Tasks Integration, which are settings of that terminal. Forward Mouse to Subprocess is a preference, applied to all such sessions and remembered across restarts.

Permission Requests and Modes

Agents may ask before doing things it has not been pre-approved for, such as editing a file outside of previously approved directories, running a command, and so on. When possible, Wing answers from the project's permission settings where they apply, and asks you where they do not. What is pre-approved is set per project; see Configuration.

Agents that offer modes -- ways of saying how much they may do without asking -- show the current mode in the session, where it can be changed by pressing Shift-Tab.

Multiple Sessions

You can have several sessions open at once, on the same agent or on different ones, each working in a directory of its own. Sessions are created automatically when you use AI Actions, or when a queue on the Execute tab of the Tasks tool spins up a session for its tasks. You can also add one with New Session, or remove the current one with the trash icon.

Cancelling MCP Calls

Long-running calls from the agent into Wing's MCP servers (for example, a test run, a code-analysis query, or an open review) can be cancelled by pressing Esc (or Ctrl-G in Emacs mode ) in the tool. Wing aborts the in-flight operation and the agent returns to its prompt without needing to reconnect.