agentfield-personal

Building a personal AgentField agent

A personal agent is a capability installed on this machine. Once it's running, the local control plane routes calls to it, other agents and coding assistants can discover and delegate to it, and the AgentField Desktop app shows it with its keys and lifecycle controls. The deliverable is not a repository — it is a working, registered, callable agent.

This skill is the workflow for getting that done. It does not use Docker, Docker Compose, a new Git repository, or a project CLAUDE.md unless the user independently asks for one of those.

Before building

Check once whether an installed agent already covers the request: af list for what's installed, and the control plane's discovery (GET /api/v1/discovery/capabilities) for what each running agent's reasoners actually do (the agentfield-use skill documents this surface). If a healthy installed agent already does the job, say so and offer to use it instead of building a duplicate — unless the user explicitly asked to build a new or replacement agent, in which case build it. A stopped-but-capable installation is not a reason to duplicate either; offer to start it with af run <name>.

For the agent's design, fetch the live SDK docs first — https://agentfield.ai/llms.txt (and llms-full.txt for depth) — that is the SDK ground truth. Decompose the job into reasoners the same way the agentfield skill teaches: by cognitive jobs, not by a single catch-all prompt. Personal agents are usually small — a handful of reasoners on one node is normal — but the design bar is the same.

Workflow

1. Build stable real source. Choose one filesystem-safe kebab-case package/name/node ID, <name>, and author the agent at ~/agentfield-agents/<name>. This directory is the durable source of truth the user will edit later. Do not author in a temporary directory, a disposable checkout, or the generated ~/.agentfield installation copy. Run language-native syntax checks and tests on the source before installing.

2. Package the source. Write the manifest at ~/agentfield-agents/<name>/agentfield-package.yaml. Put config_version: v1 at the top — the manifest schema version, distinct from the agent release version. Declare name, release version, description, author, language, a runnable entrypoint.start that matches the source and language, entrypoint.healthcheck: /health, agent_node.node_id equal to <name>, its matching agent_node.default_port, and only install dependencies the source needs.

   config_version: v1
   name: pricing-agent
   version: 0.1.0
   description: Answers pricing questions from the product catalog
   author: <user>
   language: python
   entrypoint:
     start: python main.py
     healthcheck: /health
   agent_node:
     node_id: pricing-agent
     default_port: 9301
   dependencies:
     python: [requests]
   user_environment:
     - name: OPENROUTER_API_KEY
       description: LLM provider key used for all reasoning calls
       type: secret
       scope: global
   

3. Declare secrets safely. For every external key the source actually uses, declare a user_environment entry with name, an actionable description, type: secret, and an explicit scope. Use scope: global only for deliberately reusable credentials such as a model-provider key; use scope: node for credentials or configuration specific to this agent. Do not declare invented keys.

4. Install and configure. Run af install ~/agentfield-agents/<name>. Configure each declared global key with af secrets set KEY and each node key with af secrets set --node <name> KEY, letting the CLI prompt/stdin take the value. Never invent, echo, commit, put into agentfield-package.yaml, or include secret values in a handoff.

5. Start and verify registration. Run af run <name>, then poll GET ${AGENTFIELD_SERVER:-http://localhost:8080}/api/v1/nodes until the node ID is registered in an active/healthy state. An install entry, af list entry, or successful process spawn alone is not success.

6. Invoke live. Invoke the public entry reasoner through the control plane with a representative request. For nontrivial work use async execution and poll (the agentfield-use skill documents the execute/poll surface); require a terminal successful result before calling the build done.

7. Handle failures honestly. Diagnose and safely retry correctable failures from installation, secret setup, startup, registration, or invocation (af logs <name> is the first stop). If a required secret value is known only to the user, stop with a blocking handoff that names the needed key and scope but never its value. Do not claim completion until healthy registration and a live reasoner result both succeed.

8. Hand off. Tell the user the agent is installed, running, and now appears in the AgentField Desktop app, where its declared keys are presented as a form and its lifecycle has an auto-start toggle. Include: the stable source path, the manifest path, the installed name, the public entry reasoner's invocation target, the registration and live-call verification results, and the commands to restart (af stop <name> && af run <name>), stop (af stop <name>), inspect logs (af logs <name>), and update after source edits (af install ~/agentfield-agents/<name> followed by af run <name>).