Declarative agents

Declarative agents

A declarative agent is a Microsoft 365 Copilot agent you build by describing what it should do — its name, instructions, knowledge sources, actions, and conversation starters — rather than by writing code. Copilot itself provides the language model, the orchestrator, and the runtime. You provide the configuration.

That configuration lives in a small set of JSON files inside an “app package”:

• appPackage/manifest.json — the M365 app shell (id, version, icons, permissions, where the agent shows up).
• appPackage/declarativeAgent.json — the agent itself (name, description, instructions, capabilities, actions, conversation starters).
• appPackage/instructions.txt — the natural-language system prompt.
• Optional API plugin manifests for actions that call REST APIs you own.

Why a CLI for this?

Editing JSON by hand works, but you quickly hit friction:

• The manifest schema is large and changes over time.
• Provisioning, packaging, and publishing involve several different services (Teams Toolkit, the M365 catalog, your tenant).
• Validation runs against the current shipping schema, not last week’s.
• You want the same workflow on your laptop, in CI, and inside VS Code.

Work IQ Dev Tools give you one command surface for the entire lifecycle — scaffold, edit, validate, package, provision, publish, monitor, share, evaluate — so you can move from idea to deployed agent without learning four different tools.

What Work IQ Dev Tools don’t change

Work IQ Dev Tools do not replace Copilot, ATK, or the M365 platform. Under the hood they shell out to the right tool for each step: the Agents Toolkit for provisioning, the Work IQ service for monitoring, and so on. You can always drop down to those tools directly if you need to — Work IQ Dev Tools just make the common path fast and consistent.

Go deeper

• Agent lifecycle — the end-to-end flow wiqd automates
• Host vs extensions — how Work IQ Dev Tools route each command
• wiqd agent create — scaffold your first agent
• wiqd agent show — see what’s in a project
• Agents Toolkit extension — the upstream tool that owns the manifest format