Building Your First AI Agents

Learn foundational concepts like workflows, variables, prompt structuring, markdown formatting, and AI model selection as you build and publish agents from scratch.

This guide walks you through creating two AI agents in MindStudio: a blog post generator and a Chrome extension-based summarizer. Along the way, you'll learn about workflows, variables, prompt design, and agent publishing.

Creating a New Agent

To start building:

1. Navigate to the Build tab in MindStudio.

2. Click Create New Agent.

3. You'll land inside the AI Editor on the automations canvas, where the workflow begins with a Start and End block.

Exploring Workflows and Variables

Workflows consist of functional blocks connected in sequence. Key block types include:

• User Input: Creates form fields and stores input as variables.

• Generate Text: Sends prompts to an AI model and returns text.

• Display Content: Displays output within the workflow (for testing or UI).

Working with Variables

Variables are created in form blocks and referenced using {{ double curly braces }}.

Best practice for prompt formatting:

Separate variables from instructions using custom tags.

Example:

Write a blog post about the following topic:
<topic>{{topic}}</topic>

This improves clarity and avoids formatting or grammatical issues when users input long or complex text.

Enhancing AI Prompts with Markdown Formatting

Use markdown formatting to improve the structure of the AI's output.

1. Add instructions: Make sure to use markdown formatting in your response.

2. Provide a template using example tags:

<example>
## Title of blog post  
A compelling hook...  

### Key Takeaways  
- Point one  
- Point two  

### Conclusion  
</example>

This gives the AI a clear outline to follow and leads to more consistent, polished outputs.

Publishing Your Agent

To publish your agent:

1. Click the root folder to open agent settings.

2. Provide a name, and optionally add a description, icon, or landing page.

3. Click Publish.

You can preview and re-publish at any time. Agents are private until explicitly shared.

Overview of AI Model Selection

Under Model Settings, you can:

• Choose from over 90 AI models by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and more.

• Adjust the temperature to control randomness:

  • Higher values = more variation

  • Lower values = more deterministic

• Set a response size limit, which defines the max output length.

Start with defaults and refine based on behavior and output quality.

Creating & Publishing a Summarizing Agent

To build a Chrome extension-based summarizer:

1. Create a new agent.

2. In the Start block, change the Run Mode to Browser Extension.

3. Use the launch variable page_content.

4. Add a Generate Text block with a prompt like:

Write a TLDDR summary for the following content:
<content>{{page_content}}</content>

1. Name and publish your agent (e.g., Summarize Anything).

Once published, this agent can summarize:

• Website content

• YouTube transcripts

• PDFs and documents

It becomes available inside the MindStudio Chrome extension automatically.

Conclusion and Next Steps

You’ve now built:

• A blog post generator using structured markdown prompting.

• A content summarizer for the browser using launch variables.

Along the way, you learned:

• How to use variables and form inputs

• How to structure prompts for better output

• How to configure and select AI models

• How to publish and test your agents

These techniques will serve as your foundation for building more complex AI agents. Continue experimenting, iterating, and publishing as you expand your skills in future lessons.