Vercel Releases Eve: An Open-Source AI Agent Framework Where Each Agent is a Directory of Files Mapped to Capabilities

Vercel has released eve , an open-source framework for building, running, and scaling agents. The project is published as the npm package eve , licensed under Apache-2.0.

Building an agent should mean defining what it does. It should not mean assembling all the plumbing that an agent needs to run in production.

eve is the framework Vercel builds and runs its own agents on. According to Vercel post, it runs more than a hundred agents in production today.

eve is a filesystem-first framework for durable backend agents. You create an agent as a directory on disk. The directory is the contract.

Each file describes one component of the agent. At a glance, the tree shows what an agent is and does. It also shows where it lives and when it acts on its own.

The smallest agent that runs is two files. One sets the model. The other sets the instructions.

The model is one line, and provider fallbacks are supported through AI Gateway. The instructions.md file becomes the system prompt that eve puts in front of every model call.

Vercel’s core idea is that agents have a shape. Every team kept rebuilding the same structure to meet the same needs. eve makes that shape into a framework.

The directory layout maps each capability to a folder. Here is the contract:

You add a tool, skill, channel, or schedule by adding a file. eve picks them up at build time and wires them in. There is no boilerplate to register them.

A tool is one TypeScript file with a Zod input schema. Its filename and place in the tree become its definition.

Vercel describes eve as ‘batteries included.’ Six production capabilities come with the framework:

Vercel published six agents it runs internally on eve:

Most teams assemble these pieces themselves for each new agent. The table below maps that work against what eve provides.

The comparison reflects eve’s documented capabilities. Specifics of other frameworks vary by version and setup.

You can scaffold and start a new agent with one command. It installs dependencies, scaffolds the project, and starts a dev server.

eve dev runs the agent locally with an interactive terminal UI. eve eval runs your test suites. eve build compiles inspectable artifacts under .eve/ .