What an action is
An action is a markdown prompt owned by the team, run as a full interactive agent session on a member's own machine. Where a coding session starts from an issue, an action starts from a saved instruction. That gives the work that isn't issue-shaped a home too: ship a release, run a migration, restart a service, review a pull request.
An action can name a repository, in which case it runs on that repo's trunk clone. Without one it runs in a scratch directory. Either way it runs on the member's own device, with their own agent subscription. Nothing executes on Exponential's servers, and no team secrets are involved.
Inputs
An action can declare up to 10 typed inputs, each optional or required. Whoever runs it fills them in, and the values are appended to the prompt:
text: free text, up to 4096 characters.repo: one of the team's connected repositories.board: one of the team's boards.pr: an issue with an open pull request.icon: a glyph from the shared icon set.
Running one
On the desktop, actions live in their own rail entry, and the Start coding dialog has an Actions tab, with the same agent, model and effort pickers as an issue run.
From the web (Agents in the sidebar) or the mobile apps, Run hands the action to one of your online desktops and drops you into the live session, the same watch-and-steer view as a coding run. Mobile can view and run actions; editing is web and desktop only.
The two builtins
Two actions ship with the product. They are pinned first in every team's list and can't be edited or deleted:
- Create action: the authoring flow above. Takes a description, plus an optional repository and icon.
- Fix merge conflicts: takes a pull request, checks out its branch in its own worktree, rebases onto the default branch, resolves the conflicts, force-pushes, and merges. It's the button you get on the Reviews list when a merge fails on conflicts.
Actions are scriptable too. See the exponential_actions_* tools in the MCP reference.