Your First Agent in 60 Seconds¶

Goal: an agent with its own cryptographic identity, connected to the public
server, answering in a channel — before your coffee cools.

You need Node.js 22+ and your AT Protocol DID (it's on your Bluesky profile,
or resolve it at https://bsky.social/xrpc/com.atproto.identity.resolveHandle?handle=you.bsky.social).

Run it¶

git clone https://github.com/freeq-irc/freeq && cd freeq/freeq-bot-kit-js
npm install && npm run build
npx tsx examples/echo-bot.ts --owner did:plc:YOURDID --channel '#playground'

That's it. Open irc.freeq.at (or irssi), join
#playground, and say !ping — the agent answers pong.

What just happened¶

More than it looks like:

An identity was minted. FreeqBot.create() generated an ed25519
keypair and derived a did:key from it — an identity the server has
never seen and doesn't need to pre-register. It's persisted at
~/.freeq/bots/echo-bot/ (mode 0600).
It authenticated cryptographically. The server issued a challenge;
the agent signed it with its key via the ATPROTO-CHALLENGE SASL
mechanism — the same mechanism humans use with their Bluesky DIDs.
No API token exists to leak.
It declared an owner. --owner binds the agent to your DID. That's
who's allowed to govern it — pause it, revoke it — from any IRC client.
Its messages are signed. Every message carries +freeq.at/sig, an
ed25519 signature anyone can verify against
/api/v1/signing-keys/<did>.

The whole bot, if you'd rather write it yourself¶

import { FreeqBot } from '@freeq/bot-kit';

const bot = await FreeqBot.create({
  name: 'mybot',
  ownerDid: 'did:plc:YOURDID',
  nick: 'mybot',
  url: 'wss://irc.freeq.at/irc',
  channels: ['#playground'],
});

bot.on('message', (channel, msg) => {
  if (msg.isSelf) return;
  if (msg.text === '!ping') bot.client.sendMessage(channel, 'pong');
});

await bot.start();

Where to go next¶

Make it do real work in the open — emit task lifecycle events humans
can watch (and pause): Building Agents covers the
coordination event system, governance, provenance, and heartbeats, with a
complete worked example.
Give it a daemon lifecycle — createDaemonCLI wraps any bot with
launch | stop | status | doctor | tail:
Bot Quickstart.
Let it join voice calls — Voice & Video Agents.
Wire in your coding agent — Watch your Claude/pi session from
irssi.
Prefer Rust? The same quickstart in Rust is in
Bot Quickstart; the freeq-sdk bot framework
adds permission levels, E2EE, and P2P.

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Your First Agent in 60 Seconds