A file is a program

There is no project to create. A .ecko file is a complete, runnable program.

# hello.ecko
print("Hello, AI World!")

ecko hello.ecko

No package.json, no Cargo.toml, no requirements.txt, no build step, no main function to declare, no module to register. The file is the unit. Scaffolding is never required, and nothing here assumes you used any.

Why this matters

Most scripting languages start you with ceremony, and the ceremony is where ideas die. Ecko's wager is that the distance between "I wonder if" and "it ran" should be one file and one command - especially when the thing you are trying is an AI call, where the interesting part is the prompt, not the plumbing.

The same property holds all the way up. A single file can serve HTTP, query SQLite, call three model providers and run a test suite, because the standard library is already in the binary.

When you do want a project

You never need one, but two things are worth having as a program grows.

A manifest. ecko init writes an ecko.json. It gives the program a name and version, and its fields are readable as std.defaults without any parsing:

ecko init

Dependencies. ecko get vendors a package into vendor/ and records a hash. Both of these are additive: the file still runs the same way with ecko file.ecko.

A starting point. ecko scaffold writes a small running program of a known shape - a CLI tool, a web app, an agent - for when you would rather edit something that works than start from an empty file. It downloads its templates the first time you run it and works offline after that, which makes it the one command here that needs the network to get started. Like the other two it is additive: what it writes is ordinary Ecko you own.

Multiple files

Import a sibling by path. The binding name comes from the file stem:

import "./helpers.ecko"       # binds `helpers`
import "./helpers.ecko" as h  # or choose the name

helpers.clean(text)

Only definitions marked export are visible to the importer - see Modules & imports. A directory of files with an ecko.json is a package, which is the same mechanism pointed at someone else's code.

What runs before your first line

ecko file.ecko type-checks nothing (Ecko is dynamically typed) but does run ecko check over your program first, and refuses to start on an error-level finding - an undefined name, a wrong arity, a non-exhaustive match. That turns a class of crash-on-line-400 into a message before anything executes.