Designing Agent Tools

Expert guidance for building tools that AI agents use effectively.

Before Building

Gather this context (ask if not provided):

1. Agent context — What agent uses these tools? What tasks? What other tools exist?
2. Underlying resources — What APIs/databases/services do the tools wrap? Auth required?
3. User workflows — What real-world prompts will users give? What multi-step workflows?

Core Principles

Build for Agent Affordances

Agents have limited context, process tokens sequentially, and reason in natural language: