Your First Agent

For a bespoke learning experience, start with the eve template gallery or ask your coding agent to build your use case. For example:

• “Build an eve Slack agent that answers questions from our team’s documentation.”
• “Build an eve incident-response agent that investigates alerts using our observability tools.”
• “Build an eve GitHub maintainer that triages issues and summarizes pull requests.”

If you prefer a step-by-step walkthrough, continue with this tutorial. It constructs one app end to end: a data analytics assistant. You ask in natural language, and over eight steps it learns to query sample data, run analysis in a sandbox, remember your team's metric definitions, and refuse to exceed your query budget without asking.

Step 1 gets it talking. In Step 3 you create a small local dataset that you use throughout the tutorial. You can complete the tutorial without a warehouse or Vercel Connect account. Connect a warehouse is an optional follow-up once your agent works.

Prerequisites

• Node 24 or newer and npm.
• A working model credential, configured through Getting Started. Keep the model and credential you already tested there.

If you have not run eve before, complete Getting Started first. Without a credential, "Run the agent" below fails when the runtime tries to reach the model; the dev TUI's /model flow walks you through pasting a key or linking a project.

Scaffold the agent

npx eve@latest init analytics-assistant
cd analytics-assistant

The command writes the starter agent and built-in HTTP API channel (agent/channels/eve.ts), installs dependencies, initializes Git, and offers to start the development server. Stop the server if you started it before continuing with the edits below. It does not create a Vercel project or deploy. init creates the analytics-assistant/ directory, so cd into it before running further commands.

Keep your configured model

agent/agent.ts holds the model and config. Use the same model and credentials that worked in Getting Started. The tutorial does not require switching providers. If you need to configure this new project, use /model in the dev TUI before sending your first question.

Give it an analyst persona

agent/instructions.md is the always-on system prompt. Replace the starter text with a standing identity for a data analyst:

You are a senior data analyst. You answer questions about the team's data.

- Prefer exact numbers to hand-waving. If you can compute it, compute it.
- State the assumptions behind any number you report (date range, filters, grain).
- Use the tools available to you rather than guessing. If you cannot answer from
  the data, say so plainly.

Instructions are identity and standing rules. On-demand procedures belong in skills (Step 6), and actions belong in tools (Step 3). See Instructions.

Run the agent

npm run dev

The init scaffold writes a dev script that runs the eve dev binary from the project's node_modules. The local runtime boots and the dev TUI opens. Ask it something it can answer from general knowledge first:

What's a good way to measure week-over-week retention?

You get a reply that follows the analyst persona. It can't see your data yet (that comes in Step 3). First, a look at what happened under the hood.

→ Next: How it runs

Learn more: Getting Started · Instructions