> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.cantina.xyz/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Building agents on the platform

> Build your own security agents and skills on top of the platform, within guardrails your team controls.

Cantina is an open substrate: your team can build its own security agents and skills on top of the platform, not just use the ones that ship by default.

## What you can build

* **Agents** that carry out security work in your environment, within guardrails your team controls.
* **Skills**: reusable, versioned playbooks that teach an agent how to handle a class of task to a known standard.

## How it works

Agents run against governed, human-readable playbooks. A skill declares exactly which actions an agent may take, so capability, permission, and audit live in one place. You decide the level of autonomy, and every action is logged.

## Why build your own

Out-of-the-box agents cover common work, but every environment has workflows specific to it. Building your own lets a lean team encode its expertise once and run it repeatedly, instead of doing the same work by hand.

Start from a template, customize its skills and the tools it can use, and put it into production when you are ready.