Resources: pointers to working material

Resources provide a smarter, more efficient way to share documents, data files and other information between you and your AI agents, without reinventing permissions, access controls or identity management.

Herculean acts as the central system for organising and coordinating your work, but it doesn’t need to store or access the documents and files themselves. It simply needs to know where they are.

A Resource is effectively a reference to an external location, such as a Google Drive document, shared folder, repository or another accessible file or service.

You can attach Resources directly to tasks or projects, making them discoverable by connected AI agents where they’re relevant. Read about working with AI in Herculean for more on connecting an AI service.

Herculean stores the reference, not the resource itself. It doesn’t download the content, manage credentials or grant access to the underlying files.

Whether an AI agent can actually open or use a Resource depends entirely on the permissions and capabilities available through the external service.

This means you can continue using your existing storage, sharing and security arrangements without duplicating them inside Herculean.

Project and task resources

Both you and your AI agents can create Resources and attach them directly to projects or individual tasks.

Project Resources are ideal for information shared across an entire project. For example, a software development project might reference its code repository, while a client project might link to a Google Drive folder containing all relevant documentation.

Task Resources are better suited to information associated with specific pieces of work. If an AI agent completes research, performs analysis or generates documentation, it can save those files to an accessible external service and attach them to the task as Resources.

This approach offers several practical benefits:

• Cleaner descriptions: Keep lengthy lists of document links out of task descriptions.
• Reusable references: Make shared resources, such as repositories and document folders, available throughout a project.
• Agent collaboration: Allow multiple AI agents to discover and use the same resources without repeatedly exchanging links.
• Human-in-the-loop workflows: Agents can generate documents, attach them as Resources and hand the task back for human review, making the results easy to find.
• Extensive documentation: Attach as many Resources as your work requires, whether that’s a single document or a substantial collection of research files.

This is particularly useful for complex work involving multiple agents or stages of human review. One agent can generate documentation, store it somewhere accessible and attach the Resource. You or another agent can then pick up the work without searching through lengthy task descriptions or previous conversations. See delegation and agent workflows for more on passing work between an agent and a person.

Secure by design

With decades of experience in software infrastructure, cybersecurity and the wider technology industry, I’m well aware that attempting to replicate the security and access controls of every external system would be impossible. So Resouces take the easy win and doesn’t bother.

A Resource is simply a reference to a location. Herculean stores that reference and makes it available to you and your connected AI agents. Access to the underlying information remains entirely under the control of the system hosting it.

This approach offers several important advantages.

Private networks remain private

You can reference documents, repositories and services hosted within your own private network or corporate infrastructure.

Herculean doesn’t need network access to those systems or the ability to verify that the Resources exist. As long as you or your AI agents have the appropriate access, you can use them.

You retain control of access and security

Your existing systems continue to manage authentication, authorisation and permissions.

Whether you’re using Google Drive, private repositories, internal document systems or self-hosted infrastructure, Herculean doesn’t interfere with those arrangements - you decide which agents and individuals have access, using the security controls you already have access to.

Less data means less exposure

Because Herculean doesn’t retrieve or store the contents of your Resources, it cannot expose copies of documents it never possessed.

This significantly reduces the amount of sensitive information Herculean needs to handle and avoids unnecessarily duplicating data across multiple services.

Please be aware that the Resource URLs themselves can be sensitive information and should be treated appropriately, particularly when they reveal internal infrastructure or contain sensitive identifiers.

A note about credentials

Some services allow access credentials or authentication tokens to be embedded directly within a URL.

Avoid including credentials, API keys or access tokens in Herculean Resource links.

Although Herculean doesn’t attempt to open the Resource, the URL itself is stored and may be visible to connected AI agents or anyone authorised to view the associated project or task.

Where possible, use ordinary Resource links and let the external service handle authentication through its existing access controls.

Keep security where it belongs

Ultimately, Herculean doesn’t need to become another file storage platform, identity provider or document management system.

Its job is to organise your work and help your AI agents discover the information they need.

Your files stay where you put them. Your permissions stay under your control. Herculean simply connects the work to the Resources that support it.