Guides
Core Concepts explains Opal one concept at a time. Guides is where those concepts combine.
Purpose
Core Concepts explains Opal one concept at a time. Guides is where those concepts combine.
Each guide is an outcome-based tutorial: a real scenario carried from start to finish, chosen to demonstrate one platform capability. A guide gives you the whole sequence in one page — what you need before you begin, the steps in the order they happen, and what you have when it is done.
There are three guides below, and between them they cover the three ways work gets done in Opal: directed live in a shared thread, handed to an agent as a recurring task, or carried through a defined sequence of steps as a flow. Each guide also says plainly when its way of working is the wrong one, so the set doubles as a way of choosing.
They are written for anyone who has been through Getting Started and wants to apply it to something real. No engineering background is assumed. Each guide starts where the Quickstart ends, states its own prerequisites and access requirements at the top, and points to the concept pages rather than repeating them.
This page is the index of the section, not a tutorial in itself.
| Guide | Way of working | |
|---|---|---|
| Thread | Collaborate on a Project in a Shared Thread | Directed live — several people and agents in one conversation |
| Task | Automate a Weekly Status Report | Runs on its own, on a cadence, without being started |
| Flow | Build a Content Review & Approval Workflow | A defined sequence moving between people and agents |
In This Section
- Collaborate on a Project in a Shared Thread — Run a real project in one shared thread, with several colleagues and several specialized agents working the same problem in an order you control. Collaborate on a Project in a Shared Thread
- Automate a Weekly Status Report — Hand a report someone writes by hand every week to an agent as a recurring task, with reviewers checking each run and every execution recorded. Automate a Weekly Status Report
- Build a Content Review & Approval Workflow — Lay a content approval process out as a flow: ordered steps assigned to agents and people, with review at the points where someone has to sign off before the work moves on. Build a Content Review & Approval Workflow
Key Concepts
Each guide answers a different question about the work. The fastest way to pick one is to recognize the shape of what you are trying to do.
| Guide | Choose it when |
|---|---|
| Collaborate on a Project in a Shared Thread | The work's shape is still forming, and you want to direct it as it unfolds — with more than one person and more than one agent involved. |
| Automate a Weekly Status Report | The work's shape is settled and it repeats on a cadence, so it can be described once and left to run. |
| Build a Content Review & Approval Workflow | The work happens in a fixed order, crosses several hands, and has to be checked at defined points along the way. |
They are meant to be read as a progression. The three guides build on each other — conversation first, then a single unit of repeating work, then a whole process — and each one closes by naming the others, so moving between them is part of the design.
People and agents work side by side in all three. A thread holds both as participants; a task hands execution to an agent and can keep a named person as its reviewer; a flow assigns each step to an agent or a person as the process requires. The mix is the point, not an exception.
Oversight is part of the work, not something bolted on afterwards. Where a guide sets work running without a person directing it, it also shows how the output is checked — an agent reviewer for a consistent pass on every run, a user reviewer to keep a named person accountable — and where a run is recorded so it can be traced later.
Everything runs on your own material. Each guide starts by getting the right knowledge and capabilities into the space, because that is what the agents draw on. A guide followed with your own content in place produces something usable, not a demonstration.
Guides apply the concepts; they do not re-teach them. Where a guide needs a concept explained in full, it names the page that explains it. If a term is unfamiliar, look it up in Glossary rather than inferring it.
Where to Start
Start with Collaborate on a Project in a Shared Thread. It picks up directly from the Quickstart, needs the least setup of the three, and covers the way of working you will use most often — which makes the case for moving work into a task or a flow much easier to see afterwards.
Then work through the other two in order:
- Automate a Weekly Status Report — take the part of that project that repeats every week out of the conversation and give it to an agent to run.
- Build a Content Review & Approval Workflow — take a process with a fixed order and defined checkpoints and lay it out as a flow.
Two shortcuts, if you already know what you need:
- If you have not built anything in Opal yet, do the walkthroughs in Quickstart first. Every guide here assumes them.
- If you already work comfortably in threads, go straight to Automate a Weekly Status Report, and read Core Concepts alongside it when you want the underlying concept explained in full.