Build on Chief — MCP server, REST API, and CLI

The reference tells you what every endpoint does. This page is the why: five real things you can build on Chief, what each one gets you, and the shortest path to it. Each outcome is a starting point — pick the one closest to your goal and follow the link into the details. Every example uses the ACME demo project so the snippets line up with the rest of the docs.

Add “ask your knowledge base” to your app

Ship a Q&A feature without building retrieval yourself. Point a chat at the assets in your project and Chief answers from them — no embeddings, no vector store, no pipeline to run. Start a chat over REST, poll for the answer, and return it to your user.

# Ask a scoped question; the response comes back asynchronously.
curl -sS -X POST "$CHIEF_BASE_URL/v1/chats" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $CHIEF_API_KEY" \
  -H "X-Project-Id: $CHIEF_PROJECT_ID" \
  -d '{
    "prompt": "What risks does the ACME product roadmap highlight?",
    "scope": { "asset_ids": ["asset_d8aad64dib2c7m3ae7j1"] }
  }'

The call returns chat_id and message_id immediately; poll GET /v1/chats/{chat_id}/messages/{message_id} until the response field appears. See the Chats guide for the full poll loop, or the Quickstart for an end-to-end walkthrough.

A Chief chat answering a summarize-uploads question with a two-bullet response citing the project's files — The kind of grounded, cited answer your users get back — here, two bullets summarizing the latest ACME uploads.

Email your team a daily digest

Standing reports, no cron server. An action runs a prompt on a schedule and emails the result. Schedule one every morning to summarize what landed in the project overnight — Chief runs it and sends the email; you maintain nothing.

# Every day at 07:00 in New York, summarize new assets and email the team.
chief actions create "Daily digest" \
  --prompt "Summarize assets added to the project in 5 bullet points" \
  --hour 7 --timezone America/New_York \
  --email team@example.com --email-subject "ACME daily digest"

A Chief daily digest email summarizing new ACME project uploads in five bullet points, with a View Results button — What lands in your inbox: a five-bullet summary of the day's new uploads.

The same action over REST uses a schedule plus an email outcome — see the Actions guide.

Keep a folder of docs in sync

Your repo’s docs, always searchable in Chief. Add one step to CI that uploads your docs directory; content-identical files are skipped server-side, so re-runs are cheap. Everything stays current and ready to query.

# In CI, after checkout — upload the docs tree into the project.
chief assets upload ./docs --recursive

chief assets upload showing per-file ready, dedup, and failed statuses — Uploads run in parallel, skip content-identical files, and wait for ingest by default.

Uploads run in parallel and wait for ingest by default. See the CLI command reference for flags, or the Assets guide for the underlying REST upload flow.

Give your coding agent your project’s context

Claude Code answers from your project, not just your code. Connect your agent to Chief over MCP and it can read everything your team has uploaded — ask it to summarize a document, pull themes across the project, or draft from your team’s own material, right in your editor.

# Connect Claude Code to your project over MCP.
claude mcp add chief \
  -e CHIEF_API_KEY=<your-token> \
  -e CHIEF_PROJECT_ID=<your-project-id> \
  -- chief-mcp stdio

A Claude Code session using the Chief MCP tools to list the files uploaded to a project — Claude Code reading a project's files through the Chief MCP tools.

Then just ask, in plain language: “Using Chief, what are the main themes across everything in my project?” The agent picks the tools and answers. See the MCP server page to get connected.

Tag and route new uploads automatically

Triage that happens the moment a file lands. A trigger action fires on new assets instead of on a clock — use it to label and route incoming documents so your project stays organized without anyone watching it.

# Run whenever a new asset lands, scoped to the inbox label.
chief actions create "Triage incoming" \
  --prompt "Classify this document and attach the right label" \
  --trigger new --label-id label_inbox

A trigger action takes --trigger new instead of a schedule. Pair it with labels to organize what it routes. See the Actions guide for triggers, scope, and the enable/disable lifecycle.

Where to go next

Quickstart

Zero to a chat response with plain curl.

Actions guide

Schedule and trigger automations, with an email outcome.

MCP server

Connect Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex to your project.

API reference

Every endpoint, with an interactive playground.

Get started

Guides

What you can build

Add “ask your knowledge base” to your app

Email your team a daily digest

Keep a folder of docs in sync

Give your coding agent your project’s context

Tag and route new uploads automatically

Where to go next

Quickstart

Actions guide

MCP server

API reference

​Add “ask your knowledge base” to your app

​Email your team a daily digest

​Keep a folder of docs in sync

​Give your coding agent your project’s context

​Tag and route new uploads automatically

​Where to go next

Quickstart

Actions guide

MCP server

API reference

Add “ask your knowledge base” to your app

Email your team a daily digest

Keep a folder of docs in sync

Give your coding agent your project’s context

Tag and route new uploads automatically

Where to go next