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Questions or issues? Contact us at api-support@manus.ai. Agents are custom AI entities in Manus with their own identity (nickname and description) that can be customized for specific use cases. Each agent has a main task that serves as its persistent conversation thread. You can manage agents and interact with their tasks through the API. Every account comes with a default IM (Instant Messaging) agent for general-purpose conversations. You can access it directly using shortcuts without looking up its UUID.

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Quick start: talk to an agent

Use the shortcut agent-default-main_task as task_id to directly interact with the IM agent’s main task — no need to look up UUIDs first: 
# Send a message to the IM agent
curl -X POST https://api.manus.ai/v2/task.sendMessage \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "x-manus-api-key: $MANUS_API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "task_id": "agent-default-main_task",
    "message": { "content": "Summarize today's tech news" }
  }'
Then poll for the agent’s response: 
curl 'https://api.manus.ai/v2/task.listMessages?task_id=agent-default-main_task&order=desc&limit=5' \
  -H 'x-manus-api-key: $MANUS_API_KEY'

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Shortcuts

The following shortcuts are available so you don’t need to look up UUIDs first:
ShortcutUsed asDescription
agent-default-main_tasktask_idThe IM agent’s main task. Accepted anywhere a task_id is expected.
agent-defaultagent_idThe IM agent. Use in task.list with scope=agent_subtask.

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Managing agents

Use the agent.* endpoints to list, view, and update your agents:
ActionEndpoint
List all agentsagent.list
View agent detailsagent.detail
Update nickname / descriptionagent.update

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Agent subtasks

Agents can create subtasks during execution. To view an agent’s subtasks, use task.list with scope=agent_subtask: 
curl 'https://api.manus.ai/v2/task.list?scope=agent_subtask&agent_id=agent-default' \
  -H 'x-manus-api-key: $MANUS_API_KEY'
Subtasks have task_type: "agent_subtask" in the response and can be interacted with like any other task — task.sendMessage, task.listMessages, task.stop, etc.