Your First Step: Building a Simple AI Agent with AgentForest
Welcome to the world of AI agents! If you're new to AgentForest or AI automation in general, you're in the right place. This tutorial will guide you step-by-step through creating your very first simple AI agent using AgentForest's intuitive platform—no coding experience required.
What is an AI Agent?
At its core, an AI agent is a software entity that can perceive its environment (through data inputs), reason about its observations, and take actions to achieve specific goals. AgentForest simplifies the creation and deployment of these agents for various business tasks.
Prerequisites
- An AgentForest account (Sign up for a free account if you haven't already).
- An OpenAI API key (or another supported LLM provider key). You can configure this in your Account Settings.
Step 1: Create a New Project
Log in to your AgentForest dashboard. Projects are containers for your agent systems. Click on "New Project," give it a name like "My First Agent Project," and a brief description.
Step 2: Add an Agent Worker from the Marketplace
Once your project is created, you'll be on the Project Canvas. Click "Add Agent Worker." For this tutorial, let's select the "Simple Text Summarizer" from the marketplace. This agent takes a piece of text and provides a concise summary.
Step 3: Configure Your Agent Worker
After adding the summarizer, it will appear on your canvas. Click its "Configure" button. You'll see an input field for "Text to Summarize." This is where you'll provide the text you want the agent to work on. The base configuration (like the prompt and LLM model) is pre-set from the template.
Step 4: Test Run Your Agent
Click the "Test Run" button on the agent worker card. In the test dialog, paste a paragraph of text into the "Text to Summarize" field and click "Run Test." The agent will use your configured LLM API key to process the text and return a summary.
Congratulations!
You've just built and tested your first AI agent with AgentForest! From here, you can explore other marketplace agents, learn about exposing agents as APIs (Module 1.4), or prepare for the visual builder to create more complex custom agents (Phase 2).
Happy automating!