Build your first agent

Forty minutes on Pinecall Cloud: an agent that answers from your documents, remembers who called, is tested, and goes live.

In about forty minutes you go from an empty folder to an agent that picks up a call, answers from documents you wrote, remembers who called, passes a test, and is reachable by your callers. You write the agent in the language your team already uses; everything else runs at cloud.pinecall.io.

Pick your language#

Each tutorial is the same walk, written for one language, with every command and what it prints:

TypeScript@pinecall/agents: a class with @tool methods and a render() written in JSX. Pythonpinecall on PyPI: a class with @tool methods and a Jinja view beside it. RubyThe pinecall gem: a class with tool methods and an ERB view beside it.

What every tutorial walks through#

Whatever the language, the steps are the same, because the agent runs the same way:

npm i -g pinecall installs the one pinecall command, for every language. pinecall link signs you in through the browser and writes your key to the project's .env.

Write the class#

An agent is one class. Its fields are what the agent remembers during a call, its tools are what the model may do, and its docstrings are what the model reads. A view beside it says what to do in the current turn.

Read the prompt, then talk to it#

pinecall prompt prints the exact text the model reads, with no key and no network. pinecall chat runs the agent on your machine and gives you a written caller.

Give it knowledge and memory#

A page the agent knows by heart, a folder of documents it searches on every turn, and a memory policy that says what to remember about a caller. None of it is code: they are settings, changed without a deploy.

Test it#

A unit test with no network and no model, then a golden: a conversation written down with what must be true at the end, played against a real model by pinecall test.

Ship it#

pinecall deploy runs a TypeScript project on Pinecall. A Python or Ruby agent runs on a server of yours with pinecall start --prod, or inside the app you already have.

Before you start#

Node 24 or later, for the pinecall CLI, whatever language the agent is written in.
A Pinecall account. Sign up at cloud.pinecall.io; every tutorial runs in your org's sandbox, which is yours to break.
For Python, Python 3.11 or later and uv. For Ruby, Ruby 3.2 or later and Bundler.

Next steps#

QuickstartTen minutes: the shortest path to an agent that answers. How Pinecall worksYour code, the gateway, the worker and the console: what runs where. Agent overviewThe class, explained part by part.