The Skylight Playground provides an interactive environment to test and deploy the Windows agent without writing any code. You can give natural language instructions to the agent and watch it perform tasks in real-time on a Windows desktop.

​
Creating your account

First, you need to sign up for a Skylight account. The free plan includes $5 in credit that can be used for instance runtime, built-in agent steps, and file downloads.

​
Getting Started

  1. Visit the Playground
  2. Click “New Instance” to launch a new Windows desktop
  3. Once the instance is ready, click “View”
  4. Enter your instructions in the prompt box
  5. Click “Run Agent” to start the agent

The agent will interpret your natural language instructions and perform the requested tasks on the Windows desktop. You can watch the agent work in real-time through the livestream.

The livestream is interactive - you can take control of the mouse at any time, even while the agent is running. In this case, the agent should realise that the user is interfering and act accordingly.

Clicking “Stop Agent” will immediately halt the agent while keeping the instance running. You can then edit your instructions and re-run the agent.

​
How the agent works

The agent takes the prompt given and operates on a three-part loop:

  1. Take a screenshot of the Desktop
  2. Decide on it’s next action given the state of the Desktop
  3. Select a ‘tool’ (e.g. mouse clicking) and perform the action

If previous agent runs were performed on the desktop instance, the agent will remember them (see ‘Knowledge’ in Agent).

​
Writing effective instructions

The Skylight agent is designed to reason logically about each step without needing explicit instructions. For example, you can simply ask it to ‘Make a 3-slide presentation about Pied Piper’, and it will know to open PowerPoint, add slides, populate with content, and save the file.

If you want more granular control over the agent actions, you can provide more detailed prompts like:

  • “Create a budget spreadsheet on Excel with income and expenses columns and save it as budget.xlsx”
  • “Open Paint and draw a house with a red roof and a tree on the left”

You can also chain multiple instructions:

  • “Open Word, type ‘Hello World’, save the document as hello.docx, then open PowerPoint and do the same thing”

​
Understanding agent output

The agent provides live detailed feedback about its actions:

  • Steps: Individual actions taken to complete the task (live)
  • Summary: Overview of what was accomplished (presented when the agent finishes its assigned task)

Information in the Summary is automatically saved into the ‘Knowledge’ of the specific instance to provide context to the agent for future tasks.

​
Downloading Files

Agents can create and save files (e.g. PowerPoint and Excel documents) on the virtual desktop. These live on the virtual desktop and can be downloaded to your local machine via the Skylight Playground. Files are preserved while the instance is running or hibernated, but are wiped when the instance times out or is terminated.

​
Instance Management

To optimise costs, you can manage the state of your instances based on usage.

  • Running: When you start a VM, it is automatically ‘Running’, meaning you can interact with it and operate it using the AI agent.
  • Hibernate: When you are not actively using the desktop, you can pause it. This will preserve its state without incurring full runtime costs. Hibernated instances will maintain Knowledge, files, and the state of the desktop.
  • Resume: Hibernated instances can be resumed to ‘Running’.
  • Terminate: Completely shut down the instance. Terminated instances cannot be recovered, and all information is wiped, including Knowledge, files, and desktop state - save any important work before terminating.
  • Timeout: Instances automatically terminate after the specified period of inactivity (default is 60 minutes).

New instances start with a fresh Windows desktop and standard applications.