Platform Controls
Design philosophy
Coder Agents is built on a simple premise: platform teams should have full control over how agents operate, and developers should have zero configuration burden.
This means:
- All agent configuration is admin-level. Providers, models, system prompts, and tool permissions are set by platform teams from the control plane. These are not user preferences — they are deployment-wide policies.
- Developers never need to configure anything by default. A developer just describes the work they want done. They do not need to pick a provider or write a system prompt — the platform team has already set all of that up. When a platform team enables user API keys for a provider, developers may optionally supply their own key — but this is an opt-in policy decision, not a requirement.
- Enforcement, not defaults. Settings configured by administrators are enforced server-side. Developers cannot override them. This is a deliberate distinction — a setting that a user can change is a preference, not a policy.
This is an architectural decision, not just a product choice. Because the agent loop runs in the control plane rather than inside developer workspaces, there is no local configuration for developers to modify and no agent software for them to reconfigure. The control plane is the single source of truth for how agents behave.
What platform teams control today
Providers and models
Administrators configure which LLM providers and models are available from the Coder dashboard. This includes API keys, base URLs (for enterprise proxies or self-hosted models), and per-model parameters like context limits, thinking budgets, and reasoning effort.
Developers select from the set of models an administrator has enabled. They cannot add their own providers or access models that have not been explicitly configured.
When an administrator enables user API keys on a provider, developers can supply their own key from the Agents settings page. See User API keys (BYOK) for details.
See Models for setup instructions.
System prompt
Administrators can set a system prompt that applies to all agent sessions. This is useful for establishing organizational conventions — coding standards, commit message formats, preferred libraries, or repository-specific context.
The system prompt configuration is only accessible to administrators in the dashboard. Developers do not see or interact with it.
Plan mode instructions
Administrators can add deployment-wide instructions that apply only when a chat enters plan mode. These instructions supplement the built-in planning behavior and are useful for organization-specific planning requirements such as required plan sections, approval checkpoints, or review workflows.
This setting is available under Agents > Settings > Behavior. Developers do not edit it directly.
The same value is exposed over the experimental chat configuration API:
GET /api/experimental/chats/config/plan-mode-instructionsPUT /api/experimental/chats/config/plan-mode-instructions
Template routing
Platform teams control which templates are available to agents and how the agent selects them. When a developer describes a task, the agent reads template descriptions to determine which template to provision.
By writing clear template descriptions — for example, "Use this template for Python backend services in the payments repo" — platform teams can guide the agent toward the correct infrastructure without requiring developers to understand template selection at all.
Administrators can also restrict which templates are available to agents using the template allowlist in Agents > Settings > Templates. When the allowlist is configured, the agent can only see and provision workspaces from the selected templates. When the allowlist is empty, all templates are available. This is separate from what developers see when manually creating workspaces, so you can apply stricter policies to agent-created workspaces without affecting the manual workspace experience.
See Template Optimization for best practices on writing discoverable descriptions, restricting template visibility, configuring network boundaries, scoping credentials, and designing template parameters for agent use.
MCP servers
Administrators can register external MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers that provide additional tools for agent chat sessions. This includes configuring authentication, controlling which tools are exposed via allow/deny lists, and setting availability policies that determine whether a server is mandatory, opt-out, or opt-in for each chat.
See MCP Servers for configuration details.
Virtual desktop
Administrators can enable a virtual desktop within agent workspaces.
When enabled, agents can use spawn_computer_use_agent to interact with a
desktop environment using screenshots, mouse, and keyboard input.
This setting is available under Agents > Settings > Behavior. It requires:
- The portabledesktop module to be installed in the workspace template.
- An Anthropic provider to be configured (computer use is an Anthropic capability).
Workspace autostop fallback
Administrators can set a default autostop timer for agent-created workspaces that do not define one in their template. Template-defined autostop rules always take precedence. Active conversations extend the stop time automatically.
This setting is available under Agents > Settings > Behavior. The maximum configurable value is 30 days. When disabled, workspaces follow their template's autostop rules (or none, if the template does not define any).
Spend management
Administrators can set spend limits to cap LLM usage per user within a rolling time period, with per-user and per-group overrides. The cost tracking dashboard provides visibility into per-user spending, token consumption, and per-model breakdowns.
See Spend Management for details.
Git providers
Coder Agents leverages your existing external authentication configuration to power the in-chat diff viewer and PR Insights. Self-hosted GitHub Enterprise deployments require additional configuration for these features.
See Git Providers for details.
PR Insights
PR Insights tracks pull requests created by Coder Agents and surfaces analytics on PR activity, merge rates, and cost efficiency.
See PR Insights for requirements and dashboard details.
Data retention
Administrators can configure a retention period for archived conversations. When enabled, archived conversations and orphaned files older than the retention period are automatically purged. The default is 30 days.
This setting is available under Agents > Settings > Behavior. See Data Retention for details.
Where we are headed
The controls above cover providers, models, system prompts, templates, MCP servers, usage limits, and data retention. We are continuing to invest in platform controls based on what we hear from customers deploying agents in regulated and enterprise environments.
Infrastructure-level enforcement
We believe that security-critical behaviors should not depend on the system prompt. A system prompt can instruct an agent to "always format branch names like... ," but there is no guarantee the agent will comply every time.
For controls that matter — network boundaries, git push targets, allowed hostnames — we intend to enforce them at the infrastructure and network layer. Examples of what this looks like:
- Network-restricted templates for agent workloads. Because the AI comes from the control plane, agent workspaces do not need outbound access to LLM providers. You can create templates that only permit access to your git provider and nothing else.
Why we take this approach
The common pattern in the industry today is that each developer installs and configures their own coding agent inside their development environment. This creates several problems for platform teams:
- No standardization. Different developers use different agents with different configurations. There is no unified way to enforce conventions or improve the experience across the organization.
- Security is ad-hoc. If the agent runs inside the workspace, it has access to whatever the workspace has access to — API keys, network endpoints, credentials. Restricting this requires per-workspace configuration that is difficult to maintain at scale.
- Feedback is anecdotal. Without centralized analytics, platform teams have no way to know which models perform best, which prompts cause failures, or how much agents are costing the organization.
- Configuration is a developer burden. Developers — especially those who are not power users — should not need to think about which agent to install, which API key to use, or how to configure a system prompt. They should describe the work they want done.
As models improve and the differences between agent harnesses continue to shrink, we believe the leverage shifts toward user experience and platform-level controls: which models to offer, how to enforce security, and how to use analytics to continuously improve the development experience across the organization.