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An agent in DecimalAI is three things stored in your workspace: a name, a system prompt, and the skills it can use. Your own code runs it — DecimalAI never hosts it — and decimalai init writes that code for you, so you don’t need any to start. There are three ways to set one up. They differ only in where the prompt and skills come from; all three end with the same handful of commands.

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Before you start

  • A DecimalAI account. The Free plan includes one agent; sign up.
  • A DecimalAI API key from Settings → API keys.
  • Python 3.10 or later.
  • An OpenAI API key. The generated agent calls gpt-4o-mini by default, billed to your OpenAI account.

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1. Create the agent

  1. Open app.decimal.ai/agents/new, or All agents → + New agent.
  2. Give it a name: lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens, like refund-bot. Your code finds the agent by this name, exactly as typed.
  3. Optionally say what it does and write a system prompt. You can leave the prompt empty and fill it in later.
  4. Click Create agent.
To give it skills, add them on the skill’s registry page (see the From skills you pick tab) — before or after creating the agent.

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2. Run it

Use the name you gave the agent in place of refund-bot:
  • decimalai init refund-bot looks the agent up by name and writes agent.py: a LangChain agent that reads its system prompt from your workspace when it starts and receives its skills on every turn. The top of agent.py lists the skills it will be offered.
  • python agent.py asks the agent “What can you help me with?” and prints the answer.
To ask it something else, change the question at the bottom of agent.py, or call it from your own code:
Prefer another framework? Add --framework openai-agents, --framework pydantic-ai or --framework adk to decimalai init, and install what it prints.
decimalai init with an agent name writes your agent file. Without a name, it only checks your API key and sends one test trace — that is the first step of the Quickstart.

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3. See what it did

Each run appears on the agent’s page in the dashboard, app.decimal.ai/agents/refund-bot, within a few seconds. Open a run on the Traces tab to see the question, the answer, and under Active Skills which skills it used.

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Change it later

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If something goes wrong

  • No agent named … — the name in the command doesn’t match the agent in your workspace. Names are exact; the error suggests the closest match.
  • ModuleNotFoundError — rerun the pip install line inside the same virtual environment you run agent.py from.
  • OPENAI_API_KEY is not set — agent.py checks for your model key before it starts. Export it in the shell you run it from.
  • No run on the Traces tab — check that DECIMAL_API_KEY is set in the shell that ran agent.py.

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Next

Assemble an agent from skills

How skills reach the model each turn, and how to choose them from the registry.

Catch regressions

Add the GitHub Action so every change to the agent gets an impact report.