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When you give Notis a real piece of work — refactor a repo, dig through a project, run a long research task — Notis hands it to an agent. Agent routing is where you say which agent that is, and where it runs. There are six choices:

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Auto versus a named target

Auto is the default. Notis ranks every coding-agent target your account can actually reach — your machine first, then your cloud computer, preferring whichever subscription still has usage left — and walks that chain. If nothing is connected, Auto lands on hosted Notis. Auto never fails: there is always somewhere to run. A named target is a promise. If you pick Codex Local and your laptop is asleep, the request fails and says so. It does not quietly answer from a machine that has never seen your repository. That is deliberate: the old behaviour silently walked Desktop → Cloud → Notis, which could move a local coding task onto a host with none of your files. There are no fallback checkboxes. Choosing Auto is the fallback ladder; choosing a named target is the hard pin.

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Local versus cloud

Local targets run the coding agent you already installed and signed in to, on your own computer. Notis sends it the task and reads back the result — your Codex or Claude login stays in that CLI’s own credential store and never leaves the machine. The agent gets whatever your local CLI allows: your repositories, your files, your tools. It needs the Notis desktop app running. Cloud targets run the same first-party CLI inside your Cloud Computer — an isolated container that belongs to your account. It stays available when your laptop is asleep, and the agent is boxed inside the container rather than sitting on your machine. Cloud targets need a plan that includes the Cloud Computer. Either way, the model bill goes to your own Codex or Claude subscription. Notis never asks for an API key and never accepts one. Notis is the hosted agent: no coding-agent account required. It is also where Auto ends when nothing else is ready.

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Where routing is decided

Notis resolves routing for each turn in this order, first match wins:
  1. This conversation — the agent picker in the Notis overlay or chat sidepanel.
  2. This channel or automation — the default you set on a channel, or on a single automation.
  3. Account default — usually Auto after migration; Agents routing no longer sets this from the UI.
So a channel pinned to Codex Local with Auto everywhere else is a normal setup, and picking Claude Cloud once from the overlay does not change anything permanently.