Target systems & plugins

An agent becomes useful when it works in the systems where the work already happens. In covey each of them is a plugin: it declares its actions, its scopes and its wake events, and the core knows no special cases.

What ships with it

• Zammad — triage tickets, add internal notes, reply externally; webhook as a wake source
• Zendesk Support — the same job on the other helpdesk: the thread rebuilt from the audit trail so an older answer cannot be missed, the customer's screenshot in the sandbox, a reply as an internal note or an answer; heartbeat with a cheap pre-check, or a signed webhook
• Salesforce Service Cloud — cases with their whole conversation; reply as a note, a portal comment or a mail
• GitHub and GitLab — issues, pull and merge requests, pipelines, checkout inside the sandbox
• Jira — the ticket beside the repository: search by JQL, take it on, move it through its workflow; Cloud and Data Center
• Confluence — the documentation both of them hang off: pages read and written as Markdown. Wakes nobody — an agent comes here while it works on something else
• Email (IMAP/SMTP) — a mailbox as a wake source, replies in-thread
• Microsoft Teams — chat as the channel between human and agent
• SharePoint via Microsoft Graph and Nextcloud via WebDAV — files
• Google Search Console — what a search engine did with a page, as opposed to what the page claims about itself: which addresses are indexed, which canonical Google chose instead of the declared one, what people searched for before they arrived. Read-only but for submitting a sitemap, and the OAuth scope is picked per action — an agent with scope: read holds a token that cannot write
• Browser — headless Chrome for interfaces without an API, with screenshots in the recording
• MCP — any Model Context Protocol server as a source of tools
• Kubernetes — a cluster read out: why a pod restarts, what it said before it died, where an Ingress points
• VulnDB — known vulnerabilities in dependencies (npm, Composer, Dart/Flutter)

Where they come from

Most of them are compiled in and are simply there. Three are not: Zammad, Kubernetes and VulnDB arrive from the catalogue as WebAssembly modules, and they have to be installed once — Store → Catalogue → Install. covey verifies the digest the catalogue pins before storing the module.

The difference is deliberate rather than historical: a plugin from the catalogue is upgraded without a new covey release, and a third party can publish one on exactly the terms we do. Anyone upgrading an installation across 0.6.0 installs those three once afterwards — the agents keep their access.

The action proxy

The agent does not call a target system directly. It names an action, the control plane executes it and returns the result. Three things fall out of that which you would otherwise have to build: the token stays outside, the guard-rails apply in one place, and the action lands in the recording.

Wake events

The best route is the webhook: when something happens in the ticket system, it calls covey and the responsible agent wakes up. Where there is no webhook, a heartbeat with nur-wenn: helps — the control plane checks cheaply whether there is work and otherwise wakes nobody.

Events carry a correlation key so that a waiting task is resumed instead of a new one being created.

Access in the agent

Which systems an agent may use is stated in its ACCESS.md:

- system: zammad scope: read,write,comment
- system: gitlab scope: read,write

The values behind them — URL, token — belong to the organisation, not to the agent, and are brokered at runtime.

Connecting your own system

Four routes, depending on how far the connection has to carry. The quickest is an MCP server — the agent gets its tools without anything in covey changing. A manifest describes a REST API as a JSON file and installs at runtime, with no rebuild. A WebAssembly module brings logic of its own and comes from the catalogue too. And a compiled plugin in Go is the route when the integration has to translate what the foreign system stores — Jira and Confluence do exactly that with their document formats. All four serve the same interface; the ones that ship sit in the plugin pack and are the template.

Next

• Guard-rails & control — approvals for critical actions
• Identity & secrets — how access is provided
• Backlog & lifecycle — what a wake event triggers