Strands Agents SDK Best Practices

For prompt design for Strands system prompts and tool descriptions, apply the meta-prompt-engineering skill.

Core Philosophy

Strands is model-driven: agents decide what to do, tools define what's possible. Keep system prompts focused on a single domain of expertise. Fat prompts become brittle; specialists compose cleanly.

@tool Decorator — How It Works

Strands builds the LLM tool spec from your function signature automatically:

from strands import tool

@tool
def analyze_incident(incident_key: str, severity: str, days_back: int = 30) -> str:
    """Analyze a BTS incident and return classification recommendations.