Agent Quickstart

Create an API key and export it

Your agent’s calls — CLI or SDK — fail without a key. Create one from the Developers dashboard and export it where your agent’s shell can see it:

$
export EXTEND_API_KEY="sk_xxx"

The CLI reads EXTEND_API_KEY automatically. With an SDK, pass the key when you create the client (reading it from the environment is common) — the SDK then sets the auth header and API version for you. If your agent makes raw HTTP requests instead, it must send both an Authorization: Bearer <key> header and x-extend-api-version: 2026-02-09 on every request.

Equip an agent that runs the CLI

Install the CLI:

$
brew install extend-hq/tap/extend

Confirm it’s there with extend --version. The CLI covers parse, extract, classify, split, edit, run, and batch, plus management of the resources behind them (runs, files, extractors/classifiers/splitters/workflows, webhooks).

Then install the agent skill, which is generated from the CLI’s own command tree and follows the agentskills.io standard. It teaches the harness how to drive extend correctly:

$
extend skill install

Equip an agent that writes SDK code

When your agent generates application code, drop Extend’s platform context file at the repo root. It’s the same content as the AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md convention — a compact brief on the API, SDKs, schema rules, sync-vs-async patterns, webhooks, and error handling — so the SDK code your agent writes is correct on the first try:

$
curl -fsSL https://docs.extend.ai/agents.md -o AGENTS.md

Prefer it available across projects? Save it as a reusable skill under ~/.agents/skills/ instead of per-repo.

The official SDKs cover four languages. Python, TypeScript, and Java ship polling helpers (create_and_poll / createAndPoll) and built-in webhook signature verification; Go has neither, so an agent writing Go should poll and verify signatures manually.

$
pip install extend-ai

Point your agent at the docs

Whichever path you chose, your agent can pull authoritative reference on its own:

• Index: https://docs.extend.ai/llms.txt — a curated map of every doc page.
• Any page as Markdown: append .md to a doc URL (e.g. https://docs.extend.ai/extraction/schema.md) for clean, token-cheap content.

Add these to your agent’s allowed-fetch list or mention them in your project instructions so it reaches for the docs instead of guessing.

Verify the setup

Ask your agent to run a read-only command that spends no credits and confirms the key, the CLI, and the connection all work:

$
extend extractors list

A clean list back means your agent is ready to go.