Getting Started with Carnet

Carnet is both a specification and a build system for managing AI agents through markdown files. It defines a standard format for declaring agents, skills, toolsets, and tools—then provides tools to compile, validate, and use them in your applications.

How Carnet Works

Carnet follows a simple three-step workflow:

1. Define - Write markdown files describing your agents, skills, toolsets, and tools
2. Build - Use the Carnet CLI to parse and compile these markdown files into a manifest
3. Use - Load the manifest in your application and retrieve prompts, skills, and configurations

The key insight: markdown files are human-editable and version-controllable, while the compiled manifest is optimized for production runtime use.

Language-Agnostic Design

While Carnet provides a JavaScript/TypeScript library for convenient access, the compiled manifest is a standard JSON file that any language can parse. Whether you're using Node.js, Python, Go, Rust, or any other runtime, you can read and use the Carnet manifest directly. This makes Carnet truly language-agnostic.