Self-Modification
Ask your agent to update its own instructions, tools, skills, and other authored files during local development.
When eve dev starts a local server, it mounts the bundled self-modification extension by default. Ask your agent to change its instructions, tools, skills, or other files under agent/; eve delegates the source work to the self-modification__agent subagent. Connecting to an existing server with eve remote connect --url <url> does not add the bundled extension to that server.
The bundled extension is for local development and is not included in production builds.
For example, ask the agent to add a reusable action:
The self-modification subagent changes the authored files in your project. Review the diff and test the new behavior as you would for any other source change. eve dev reloads changes while you work.
Change the self-modification model
The subagent uses your agent's model by default. To give it a different model or reasoning level, ask for it directly:
The first time, this creates agent/extensions/self-modification/extension.ts with those settings. After that file exists, later changes edit it. You can also edit the file yourself: it accepts model and reasoning options.
Run without self-modification
Pass --no-default-extensions when you do not want eve dev to mount bundled development extensions:
This disables the complete bundled default set for that server, including self-modification. It does not remove files from your project or disable extensions that you have explicitly mounted under agent/extensions/.
What to read next
- Terminal UI: work with your agent locally.
- Instructions: define the agent's behavior.
- Tools: add model-callable actions.
- Skills: give the agent reusable procedures.