Assistants are the reusable specialists inside Kaer. They matter when one good chat pattern turns into something you want to keep around, name properly, and hand to other people without rewriting the brief each time.
What belongs here
Use Assistants when the work has a recognisable role. A research assistant, a release writer, a client update assistant, or an internal reviewer are all easier to reuse when they live here instead of being buried in old chat threads. The page gives those roles a stable home.
How the page should be read
Each card tells you whether an assistant is active, when it was last updated, and what kind of working style it is set up for. That makes it possible to judge quickly whether the assistant is current, whether it is still being used, and whether it should be refined before you rely on it for real work.
When to create one instead of staying in chat
If a pattern still changes heavily from one run to the next, leave it in Agent Workspace. Create an assistant when the role is already clear and the main gain is consistency. That is the point where the saved setup becomes useful rather than restrictive.
Assistants vs skills
An assistant is a specialist you open deliberately: you pick it, then work with it. A skill — in Customise — is a way of having a class of task approached, and it applies itself whenever a request matches the conditions you set, whoever you happen to be talking to.
So the question is whether you want to choose the behaviour or have it always apply. "A release-notes writer I open when it is release day" is an assistant. "However anyone asks for release notes, group them Added / Fixed / Changed and write them for customers" is a skill. They combine happily: an assistant working on a task a skill applies to gets both.
The cleanest way to improve one
The best refinement loop is still practical. Run the work, review the result, then tighten the assistant based on what was missing. If the output keeps drifting in the same direction, the assistant definition needs revision. If the work itself keeps changing, the issue is usually scope rather than the assistant.