CrewAI Getting Started & Architecture

How to choose the right abstraction, scaffold a project, and wire everything together.

Verified against crewai 1.15.23 on 2026-10-01. Live-tested with real LLMs on 2026-10-01. Run crewai version first; if the major/minor differs from 1.15, re-check version-sensitive details with the ask-docs skill.

MANDATORY WORKFLOW — Read This First

NEVER manually create crewAI project files. Always scaffold with the CLI:

crewai create flow <project_name>

This is not optional. Even if you only need one crew, even if you know the file structure by heart — run the CLI first, then modify the generated files. Do NOT write main.py, crew.py, agents.yaml, tasks.yaml, or pyproject.toml by hand from scratch.