Ask HackerNews

A natural-language search and analytics agent over ~44M HackerNews items, built with Vercel Eve — the framework for building agents ("like Next.js for web apps, but for agents") — and Upstash Redis Search. The data comes from the same source as HackerNews Trends.

Ask things like "top stories about Rust", "what do people say about remote work?", or "average score of stories vs jobs" and the agent grounds its answer in real HackerNews data.

Live example: https://upstash-hackernews-eve-agent.vercel.app/

How it works

Eve is a filesystem-first framework for durable agents: you write capabilities under agent/, and Eve runs the model loop, persists sessions, and serves the agent over HTTP. This project pairs it with a Next.js web chat via withEve.

The agent has three thin tools that forward a raw Upstash Redis Search options object straight to the Upstash Redis SDK, so the model has the full power of the query language:

Tool	Backed by	Use
query	index.query()	Search / filter / sort / paginate documents.
count	index.count()	Count documents matching a filter.
aggregate	index.aggregate()	Analytics: averages, sums, grouping, histograms.

The query syntax and the index schema live in the agent's system prompt, so the model can author queries directly.

The hn index

A hash index (prefix hn:) over HackerNews stories, comments, Ask/Show HN, jobs and polls:

Field	Type	Notes
title, text	TEXT	Full-text search.
by, type	KEYWORD	Author, item type.
score, ndesc, parent	F64 (FAST)	Points, comment count, parent id.
time	DATE (FAST)	Creation time.

Project layout

agent/
  agent.ts                 # model + runtime config
  instructions.md          # system prompt + Upstash Redis Search query reference
  channels/eve.ts          # HTTP channel (auth)
  lib/hn-index.ts          # shared Upstash Redis client + `hn` index
  tools/{query,count,aggregate}.ts
app/                       # Next.js chat UI (useEveAgent)
components/                # UI primitives
next.config.ts             # withEve(...)

Setup

Requires Node 24+.

npm install

Set credentials in .env (read by Redis.fromEnv()):

OPENAI_API_KEY=...
UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL=...
UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_TOKEN=...

Create an Upstash Redis database at console.upstash.com, and an OpenAI key at platform.openai.com. To build your own index, see the Upstash Redis Search docs.

Run

npm run dev      # Next.js + Eve dev server → http://localhost:3000

Or drive just the agent over HTTP:

curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:3000/eve/v1/session \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"message":"What are the top HackerNews stories about Rust?"}'

Deploy

Deploys to Vercel as a single project (Next.js app + Eve runtime). Make sure your Vercel CLI is up to date, then vercel deploy. Before going to production, review Auth & route protection — this demo uses none() so the agent is publicly callable.

Links

• Vercel Eve · Eve docs
• Upstash Redis Search · @upstash/redis
• HackerNews Trends