Getting Started With Avi Part 1

How to get prepared for setup.

Read more articles about the development of Avi and how to use it.

This article is a two-part guide to getting started with Avi. It will take you through installation, setting up API keys, and running your first simple agent. I will follow up with more articles on details usage over the next few days.

First of all Avi is a single executable file. No installation system needed, you just download, place it somewhere on you computer where you want to run it from, click it, and it will set itself up.

Avi is tiny. Because it is running in Rust, it is coming in around 26mb in size, which is roughly the size of 6 or 7 photos taken on you phone. This is not bloatware (take note Microsoft). It also never crashes ;)

Avi works on Windows, OSX, and Linux. I have thoroughly tested this on windows only, but do have it running on a mac and three different Linux boxes. The interface is identical on each platform.

Avi also has a built in bug-reporting system which is a little worm icon in the bottom left of every screen. Clicking that allows you to fill in a bug report. Please do. I am sure we will find some today. My agent is waiting for them.

API Key Requirements

The Avi System supports most LLMs including local ones. If you have a machine with 16GB of VRAM you can run this entire thing locally, but I will cover that in a different article.

But to get started you will need an OpenRouter API key and a balance of $5 before AVI will let you in. Even if you are running locally, AVI uses some tiny models on OpenRouter to run its system. This typically costs less than 8c a day.

To get started, go to OpenRouter.com, create an account and create an API key, deposit $5 and copy your key…

Secondly, if you want to run your agents really cheaply I suggest you go and get a OpenCoder Go subscription for $5 for the first month, $10 thereafter. This will give you effectively $60 of real-world credits. I have not exceeded this, even with all of my testing during development.

You can run entirely without this and just use OpenRouter without a Go subscription but it will cost you about three times as much to run your agents.

To get that subscription head on over to: https://opencode.ai/go

Once you have done all of that, you will need to sign up for some free APIs that Avi uses. You will need to go to each of these and grab your free API key.

Brave Search API
This gives Avi amazing and cheap search access, it will fall back to other services if not available but you get $5 of credits a month for free. I have used less that 10% of that so far so it is more than enough.

Please Note: You don’t need to sign-up for this if you don’t want to, Avi will fall back to Jira (see below)

AgentMail
This is an email service that gives your agents their own email inbox. I use it to email my own agents, I sign them up to newsletters, and they can easily send email from their own address. You get three free email addresses. Log in/grab an API key, and that’s all you need.

Firecrawl API Key
Avi now uses its own internal scraper but falls back to this on really difficult pages, you get plenty of free credits and is worth having.

Jina Reader API Key
This is what Avi uses to read paywalled sites like Medium, NYTimes etc. when its own system fails. You get 10 million tokens of the free tier, and you can even top that up. This is a cool API to have.

So go and get those setup while I am waiting for my build system to create the release version of the app.