Go through your agent and ask, of each box you filled in: would this be wrong in a stranger's hands? If yes, it needs to be a question. If it would work fine for anyone, leave it alone.
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Publishing
Builder questions
Your agent runs in someone else's account. Builder questions are how it learns which channel, which sheet and which inbox are theirs.
What they are
You built your agent inside your own account. It points at your Slack channel, your spreadsheet, your inbox. When someone else runs it, they get their own private copy — and every one of those boxes still points at your things. Their briefing would try to post into your channel, and fail.
A builder question fixes one of those boxes. You flip "Ask user" on the field, write the question in your own words, and when someone sets your agent up they answer it once. Their answer goes into their copy, and yours is never touched.
You choose them in the "All nodes" step of publishing, where every step of your agent is listed with its settings, each with an "Ask user" switch.
The one question to ask yourself
What to ask for
| What it looks like | Examples | |
|---|---|---|
| Always ask | It points at something in your account. Left alone, it breaks for everyone else — or worse, quietly writes into your stuff. | A Slack channel, a spreadsheet, a calendar, a Drive folder, the email address results are sent to. |
| Worth asking | It works either way, but people genuinely differ. Keep your value as the default and mark it optional. | How many days of warning before a deadline, how far back to look on the first run, which timezone dates are read in. |
| Never ask | Someone would have to understand how you built the agent to answer it. If it needs explaining, it is not a question. | Memory keys, model names, length limits, retry switches, debug flags, prompts you tuned. |
| Cannot ask | There is no answer that stays true. These are wired up for you and are not offered. | Boxes filled by an earlier step, app connections, and the schedule itself. |
Keep the list short. Every question is one more thing standing between someone and their first run — four is a lot, one or two is common. If you are heading past five, the agent usually wants rebuilding rather than more questions.
How to spot them
You do not have to guess. Look at what you typed into each box — the value itself gives it away.
- A long code you did not write by hand — something like
C0BMDNDCXC5. That is a name tag for something in your account. Always ask. - Your own email address sitting in a box. Ask, or every buyer's results come to you.
- A folder set to your whole Drive. Ask, and say in the question that they should pick one folder — or every file they ever save gets picked up.
- The word "primary" for a calendar. That already means "whoever is running this". Leave it off — it is portable as it stands.
- Something the agent already works out, like reading the person's own email address in an earlier step. Leave it off. Asking would replace a correct answer with someone's guess.
- The same value in several steps. Turn it on once and use Bind so they answer once and it fills everywhere.
- A step you named as a question — "Which spreadsheet does your sign-up form fill?". That was you leaving yourself a note. Turn it on.
The best question is the one you never ask
If your agent creates what it needs — makes its own spreadsheet on the first run instead of pointing at yours — there is nothing to ask and nothing to get wrong. When you have a choice while building, choose that.
How to word them
The next step shows each field you switched on with a box for the question. Write it as though you were sitting next to the person.
- Use their words, not the app's. "Which channel should your daily briefing go to?" — never the internal name of the box.
- Say what it changes. "This decides what time the briefing arrives" tells them how to choose.
- Show the format when it matters. For a timezone: a place name like Asia/Kolkata or Europe/London — not IST, not +5:30.
- Say what happens if they get it wrong. "If the name is not recognised, dates fall back to UTC and the briefing tells you." That single sentence prevents most support messages.
- Use the description for help, not a second question. One question per box.
- Give options where there is a fixed set, so they pick instead of typing.
Three traps
Asking for the same thing twice
If two questions have to match each other to work — a timezone in the schedule and a timezone in a step, or a spreadsheet picked from a list and the same one pasted as a code — someone will eventually fill them differently. Nothing errors; the agent just goes quietly wrong. Use Bind where you can, and where you cannot, change the agent so the value is only needed once.
A picker plus a hidden inner name
Asking for a spreadsheet does not fix the tab inside it. Tab names carry their own hidden id that only exists in your copy, so a buyer's sheet can never match it and the run stops with "sheet not found". Build the agent to find the tab by its visible name instead. The same goes for anything nested inside something else you are asking for.
A box you never touched will not appear
Only settings you actually set in Activepieces travel with your agent. If a field you expected is missing from the list, go back, give it a value even if it is the one already shown, export again and re-upload.