Writing HiveLang in the Hive IDE

The visual builders are great, but sometimes you want to write the bot yourself. The Hive IDE (under Developer) is a code-first editor for HiveLang.

Why use it

• Full control over a bot's instructions, capabilities, and logic.
• Use language features the form builders don't surface — parallel, retry/fallback, remember/recall, delegate.
• Copy/paste and version your bot definitions as plain text.

A complete bot

hivelang
bot SupportTriage {
  instructions {
    Triage incoming support messages. Classify urgency and draft a reply.
  }

  capabilities {
    ai.generate
    knowledge.search
  }

  on user.message {
    call knowledge.search with { query: input } as context

    call ai.generate with {
      prompt: "Using this context: " + context +
              "\nDraft a helpful reply to: " + input
    } as reply

    respond with reply
  }
}

Handy patterns

• Resilience: wrap a flaky call in retry … with backoff exponential max attempts 3 fallback { … }.
• Speed: run independent calls inside parallel { … }.
• State: remember "key" as value and recall "key" as v default fallback to persist across turns.

Run & iterate

Run the bot right in the IDE, read the output, and refine. When it's right, save — it joins your bot list like any other, ready to deploy or drop into a workflow.

Learn the language

See Understanding HiveLang and the HiveLang docs for the full reference.