Build Your Own AI Ops Assistant — Part 2: Foundation

This is Part 2 of a 6-part series on building your own AI-powered internal assistant. Part 1 covers the why and architecture overview. Harper Setup, Schema & Your First Endpoint In Part 1, you saw what Harper Eye can do, structured incident analysis in Slack, expert routing, and a self-improving knowledge base. Now we build the foundation. In this part, you'll go from zero to a running application with a database, vector-indexed tables, and a deployed, live REST API. Takes about 30 minutes. By the end of this article, you'll have the infrastructure for everything you see in this dashboard: Step 1: Install Harper & Create Your Project If you want to develop locally first (recommended), install Harper: npm install -g harperdb Now scaffold your project: mkdir harper-eye && cd harper-eye npm init -y Update your package.json with the dependencies we'll need: { "name" : "harper-eye" , "version" : "1.0.0" , "description" : "AI-powered ops assistant — searches internal tools, synthesizes with