Modes

Mode	What it does	Edits files?	Output
agent	Does the work and hands you a reviewable diff	Yes	Diff, validator results and a report
plan	Quick, phased planning; asks at most one round of questions	No	Phased plan
debug	Gathers evidence and builds a hypothesis tree	No	Root-cause writeup
review	Read-only critique of a diff or PR	No	Structured review

Agent mode picks its own effort level from the task, and suggests Plan for large greenfield or multi-file builds.

Switching modes

• In the REPL: /agent, /plan, /debug, /review.
• From the terminal: sparse agent "…", sparse plan "…", sparse debug "…", sparse review. These are shortcuts for sparse run -m <mode>.
• In the desktop app: the mode picker in the chat composer.

orchestrate is also available from the CLI (sparse orchestrate "…" or /orchestrate). It runs at high effort by default.

Effort

low, medium, high or max. Set it with -e on the command line or /effort in the REPL. The default is medium.