Finding agents & chatting

This page covers the end-user loop: find an agent in Explore, open its page, and talk to it.

The Explore tab

Explore is the store surface. Top to bottom you’ll find:

• A hero card and curated sections of featured agents.
• Category chips to filter the listing grid.
• A “New” rail — recently published agents, freshest first.
• An “Official apps” rail — agents published by Guuey.
• The all-agents grid, filtered by whatever category or search you’ve applied.

Search matches agent names, descriptions, and categories as you type. When a search or category comes up empty, Explore says so and offers a way back rather than showing a blank screen.

Explore or Discover?

Explore and Discover are the same surface. The Portal tab (and sidebar entry) is labeled Explore, the page heading inside it reads Discover, and Studio’s Share drawer calls the listing destination “Portal Discover” (“List in Discover”). If a builder tells you their agent is “listed in Discover”, look in the Explore tab.

The agent page

Tapping any listing opens the agent’s page at /agent/<id> (agents that claimed a URL slug get /agent/<slug>). Unlisted share links from Studio open this same page — the only difference is the agent isn’t browsable in Explore. From here you can:

• Add the agent to your Agents tab (requires sign-in — your list is part of your account).
• Start chatting right away.

A link to an agent that was deleted or never existed lands on an honest “doesn’t exist” state. Delisting from Explore doesn’t break direct links — a live agent’s page keeps working.

Guests and the sign-in gate

Whether you can chat signed-out is the builder’s choice, per agent:

• Guest-open agents — tap Start Chat and you’re in. No account needed.
• Sign-in-required agents — the agent page’s Start Chat button reads Sign in to chat; tap it, sign in, and Portal brings you back to the agent’s page to start the conversation. (Scanning a QR code for such an agent while signed out shows a short sign-in sheet first.)

Sign-in options and what happens to your guest activity when you create an account are covered in Account & settings.

Agent availability

Every agent on Guuey runs on its own isolated, long-running infrastructure, and Portal talks to it directly. Three states you’ll see:

• Starting up — a just-deployed agent (or one just resumed from pause) can take a minute to come up. The chat header shows “Connecting…”, switching to “Waking your agent…” if the first connection is slow. Once live, an agent stays running between conversations — there is no idle wake-up.
• Paused — trial ended — the agent’s free trial expired and its builder hasn’t picked a plan. The composer is disabled; only the builder can resume it. See Plans and billing.
• Not live — the agent has no live deployment yet (the builder created it but nothing is serving).

The conversation

• Streaming replies — responses stream in live as the agent writes them, with Markdown formatting.
• Generative UI — agents built on Guuey’s default MCP server don’t just answer in text: tool results can render as interactive cards inline in the conversation. Generative UI is the ggui protocol; see its docs for what agents can render.
• Persistent history — the agent keeps the conversation server-side, one thread per agent. Reopening a thread — from the Chats tab, or after a reload — replays the full transcript, including cards.

On desktop web, the Chats tab is a two-pane layout: your conversation list on the left, the open thread on the right.

When an agent asks permission

Some things an agent won’t do until you say yes, and it asks inline in the chat with a consent card:

• Using a third-party service on your behalf — when an agent’s tool needs one of your accounts (say, your calendar), a card asks you to connect it. You authorize once per service; the card offers Always allow, Allow this chat, or Not now — Not now records nothing, so the agent may ask again.
• Sharing your cross-app profile — an agent that wants access to what other agents know about you asks with the same kind of card; here declining (Don’t allow) is recorded, so the agent won’t re-ask. The cross-app profile is rolling out per environment — see State and memory.

Answering the card resumes the turn. You can review or revoke everything you’ve granted later — see Account & settings for the Connected services and Profile sharing screens. Revoking there is respected in chat: a service you’ve blocked for an app isn’t re-asked for.

Pairing a self-hosted server

Portal is a universal client: alongside Guuey-hosted agents, it can pair with a self-hosted ggui server running on your own machine.

1. Run ggui serve locally — it prints a URL and a 6-digit pairing code (single-use, valid ~10 minutes).
2. In Portal, go to Settings → Servers → Add a self-hosted server and enter both.

Paired servers appear in the Servers list with a live status dot; tap one to make it the active origin, and Explore then browses that server’s agents instead. Self-hosting itself is covered in the ggui docs.