Build Your First Agent

Follow this guide to build a “news assistant” agent that organizes the market trends you care about every morning. Takes about 5 minutes.

In UpServe you don’t write behavior instructions by hand. You toss the role (mission) of the agent you want as a single line, and Agent Father — a guide agent — interviews you to fill in the blanks and create the assistant. From there the assistant proposes how it’ll work, and you either accept or give it direct instructions.

Prerequisites

• An UpServe account (sign up at upserve.app )
• 1–3 keywords you care about (e.g. “AI startups”, “semiconductor market”)

Step 1: Summon Agent Father

1. Open the Agents page 
2. Click the Create Agent button in the left sidebar header → choose New Agent (on iOS, tap the + icon at the top right of the Agents screen)
3. A chat window with Agent Father opens — Father greets you first

Agent Father is a guide agent that interviews you about the agent you want, then picks an appropriate model, tools, and behavior instructions and creates the real agent for you. Once creation is done, Father is cleaned up automatically.

Step 2: Toss “what kind of assistant do you need?” as one line

You don’t have to spell out the task details (time, keywords, count, tone). Just tell Father the role you want.

Build me a news assistant that keeps an eye on the market trends I care about.

Father doesn’t create it right away — it does a short interview to figure out how to set up the assistant. Some questions arrive as cards that mix a name field with choice buttons — pick one or type your own.

Father — Sounds good. Which markets do you want to watch?

You — Mostly AI startups and semiconductors.

Father — Would you like to receive it every morning, or just ask whenever you need to?

You — Every morning, before work.

Father — What should I name the assistant?

You — Let’s call it Morning Brief.

You don’t have to answer every question. Saying “you decide” lets Father infer and fill them in.

What Father decides for you

You can interject at any time during the interview: “use a faster model”, “rename it to Morning Brief”, and Father adjusts.

Step 3: The assistant proposes how it’ll work

When the interview wraps up, Father first shows a summary card of how it plans to build the assistant. You can review the role, briefing style, and even the skills it will install at a glance, then hit Create or Let me edit to refine it further.

Hitting Create actually creates the assistant and the UI navigates straight to the new assistant’s chat screen. (The Father chat is cleaned up automatically right after the agent is created.)

The assistant’s opening message is generated automatically — it introduces itself and proposes how it plans to work right from the first screen. It may also ask whether to start right away or which topic to open with.

Morning Brief — Hi. Each morning at 8 AM I’ll scan the last 24 hours of news on AI startups and the semiconductor market, summarize the 5 most important stories, and end with “one trend to watch today”. Tone: concise and friendly. Shall I register this as a daily auto-run?

You only need to do one of two things here.

• Looks good → “Sounds great, do it.” → The assistant registers the schedule, and the first push arrives tomorrow morning.
• Want to tweak → Just say it. e.g. “Make it 7:30, not 8”, “Skip the trend line”, “Include source links too”

The assistant can refine its own behavior instructions through chat — you don’t have to dive into a settings screen to edit them.

Step 4: Try it once by direct instruction

If you want to preview the result before the auto-run kicks in, just ask the assistant on the spot.

Show me today's news briefing.

When it gets your request, the assistant runs tools like web search several times on its own to gather material, manages the work steps as a checklist, and then delivers an organized result. The chat shows which tools it used and how many times (e.g. web_search (13×)) alongside the progress.

Keep it as-is if you like it, or refine it through chat:

• “Lengthen the trend line to two lines”
• “Drop the emojis”
• “Group US-listed companies separately”

This is how the assistant works in two modes side by side: (a) autonomous run — on its own per the schedule — and (b) direct instruction — instantly when you ask.

Step 5: Adjust the schedule (optional)

Heartbeat — “look around on its own”, on by default

Your assistant has a heartbeat on by default. While the heartbeat is on, the assistant looks at the situation and decides on its own when to check in next — less often when there’s nothing to do, more often when something’s pending. So even without an exact schedule, the assistant wakes up and looks for work on its own. If you want it to only handle what you ask, turn the heartbeat off in the Schedules tab.

Want it to run at a fixed time — Add a Schedule

If you want it to run at an exactly fixed time like every morning at 8 AM, add a schedule. If you accepted the assistant’s proposal in Step 3, it may already be registered. To change the time or the trigger message, just ask the assistant — or adjust it in the UI.

Ask the assistant:

Schedule this to run automatically every morning at 8 AM.

Set it up visually in the UI

Open https://upserve.app/agents/{agentId}/schedules (or the Schedules tab on the agent page) for a visual editor. You never write a cron expression by hand.

1. Click Add Schedule in the top right
2. In the Active Time Slots card, just click/select:
   • Days — toggle Mon–Sun buttons
   • Time range — start and end times (e.g. 08:00–09:00)
   • Interval — pick from the Every N hours dropdown
3. Actual fire times are previewed as dots on the 24-hour timeline (with a textual → 09:00, 11:00, 13:00 and 2 more preview too)

The times landed within an active window are a baseline. While the heartbeat is on, they auto-adjust to the day — less often when quiet, more often when busy.

4. Click Save to register. When woken by the schedule, the assistant acts on its own behavior instructions — you don’t have to send the same chat message for each run. To change what it does, just chat with the assistant: “update your behavior instructions like so.”

Tip — For a single fire at 8 AM daily, set the time range to 08:00–09:00 with an interval of 1 hour. Bands repeat at the chosen interval within the active window, so a pattern like “weekdays 9 AM–6 PM, every 30 min” fits in a single card. Need multiple bands? Use + Add Time Slot to layer them.

The timezone follows your profile setting (e.g. Asia/Seoul) automatically. The first push arrives tomorrow at 8 AM.

What happens every morning at 8 AM

   ⏰ Every day, 8 AM
        │
        ▼
 ┌──────────────────────────────────┐
 │  Morning Brief — news assistant  │
 │  (model picked by Father)        │
 └──────────────────────────────────┘
        │
        │  ① Web search "AI startups (last 24h)"
        │  ② Web search "semiconductor market (last 24h)"
        ▼
 ┌───────────────────────────────────┐
 │  Pick top 5 + one-line summaries  │
 │  + one trend to watch             │
 └───────────────────────────────────┘
        │
        │  ③ Deliver to user
        ▼
 📱 Push notification   ✉️ In-app chat message

Variations

The same pattern (toss the role as one line; Father interviews; the assistant proposes how to operate) works for assistants like:

• Competitor price assistant — “An assistant that keeps an eye on competitor price changes”
• To-do reminder assistant — “An assistant that pokes me about pending items each morning”
• Weekly report assistant — “An assistant that wraps up the week into a Friday report”

Advanced

Author the behavior instructions by hand

If you’d rather skip the full interview and write the behavior instructions yourself, this section is for you. It’s best suited to users who already craft instructions by hand in tools like Claude Code or Cursor.

Click the + button on the Agents page  to open the Father chat. Ask Father something like “just create one with defaults” or “skip the interview and build it now” — Father will minimize the questions or infer everything and create the agent immediately.

Once the agent is created, the items you can adjust directly in the agent’s Settings screen are Name · Mission (core purpose) · Description · Model · Enabled tools · Memory retention, and so on. Just write your intended purpose clearly in the Mission field, like this:

Organize AI startup and semiconductor market trends every morning so they can be read in 5 minutes.
Focus on the few changes that can't be missed and what they mean for today.

UpServe has no separate box for writing a whole system prompt. You steer the detailed behavior (tone, format, rules) through chat, and the assistant folds it into its own instructions — just message the agent things like “update your behavior instructions like so” or “always attach source links”.

Tools: enable web search only. Schedule: Schedules tab → Add Schedule → select all days Mon–Sun, time range 08:00–09:00, interval Every 1 hour → Save. (Or leave the heartbeat on and let the assistant look around on its own.)

Installing a marketplace preset that needs customization

Some presets in the marketplace include items that need to be tailored to your setup — such as keywords or account connections. When you install one of these presets, a short interview screen appears first. Answer the questions and your personalized agent is created automatically. Once the interview is done, the UI takes you straight to the new agent’s chat screen.

For the full installation flow, see Installing Skills & Presets.

Next steps

• Equipping Tools — Which tool fits which situation
• Installing Skills & Presets — Use battle-tested packages from others