Can the Ask assistant in the Tares console change my labels or triggers, or only read data?

Tares Ask can draft changes to your labels and triggers, and nothing changes until you click Apply on the card. Its investigation tools only read data. Its two proposal tools, propose_labels and propose_trigger, turn what it finds into cards you Apply or skip.

How it works

Ask is the assistant built into the Tares console. It runs as a chat loop on the daemon, with up to 10 tool rounds per question, and shows each tool call as it works.

There are two kinds of tools:

• Read tools. These are thin calls to the daemon’s own read endpoints, so Ask sees exactly what the API exposes and nothing more. They list sources and connectors, describe a catalog object (schema, entities, freshness, samples), profile a source’s fields, list entities, read recent events, list projects, and read a correlated timeline across every source or only a project’s.
• Proposal tools. propose_labels and propose_trigger draft catalog changes as cards in the chat. A proposed trigger names its sources.

The proposals themselves change nothing. A card is a draft. When you click Apply, the change goes through the same validated management APIs the console forms use, so a change from Ask passes the same checks as one you type into a form. If you skip the card, nothing happens.

Where an applied change lands depends on what it is. A trigger you apply from Ask goes to the Default project. You can then work with it like any other trigger in that project.

Set it up

You need a running Tares and a model provider. Ask runs on the instance’s default provider, and the chat tells you which one it is.

1. Start Tares locally if you have not already. Tares Cloud users can skip this step.

tares up

2. Give the instance a model provider. Either set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in the daemon’s environment, or add a provider in the console under Settings → Model providers. The model is that provider’s default. On Anthropic it is TARES_AGENT_MODEL, which is claude-sonnet-4-6 unless you set it.
3. Open Ask in the console sidebar, or press ⌘K from anywhere in the console.
4. Ask a question that leads to a change. For example, ask why a label is missing on a source, or ask for a trigger that fires on a pattern you just found. The empty state offers starter questions for exploring data, debugging and organizing.
5. Read the card Ask proposes. For labels, check the fields it picked. For a trigger, check the sources it names. Click Apply to make the change, or skip the card to discard it.
6. If you applied a trigger, open the Default project to find it.

For the wider picture of how Tares watches your systems and raises alerts, see AI SRE.

What you get

• Read access without side effects. You can explore sources, entities, events and timelines, and debug questions like “is anything not ingesting?” or “what looks sparse?” from live health and field coverage, with no risk of changing anything.
• Drafts you control. Label and trigger changes appear as cards. You decide whether each one is applied, so Ask never edits your catalog on its own.
• The same validation as the console. Apply uses the management APIs behind the console forms, so what Ask creates is checked the same way as what you create by hand.
• Visible work. Each tool call shows as Ask makes it, so you can see how it reached a proposal before you apply it.
• A predictable home for triggers. A trigger applied from Ask goes to the Default project.

The full description of the feature is on the Ask page.

When something else fits

• Ask lives inside the console and reads this one instance. If you want an agent in your own workflow, such as Claude Code, Cursor or your own service, connect it to Tares over MCP. It gets the same read surface plus subscriptions.
• If you want a trigger in a project other than Default, or want to write it by hand with exact filters, conditions and cooldowns, use the console forms or the trigger configuration rather than applying a card from Ask.
• To set up a whole project from a goal instead of asking questions, use the guided setup.

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