Agent Guidebook
Core Concepts
Tools

Tools

Tools help your agent perform actions or fetch information from the outside world.

Your starter project already has a few tools in src/example_tools (opens in a new tab) that you can edit and use.

And you can import or find more open source tools in the Steamship SDK (opens in a new tab):

Tools are run in the Cloud

Every Steamship tool is managed for you and run in the cloud. That way you, and your agent, can use them like Python functions without worrying about:

  • Authentication (for tools that require it, like DALL-E)
  • Logging so you can track what each agent is doing
  • Metering so you can track how much each agent is using
  • Load balancing & rate limiting so you don't have to worry about overloading API endpoints
  • Retry on error so you don't have to add your own retry logic
  • Async execution so you can kick off large jobs without worrying about HTTP timeouts

Building your own tool

A tool is just a basic Python class with a few fields:

class TextRewritingTool(Tool):
    name: str = "TextRewritingTool"
    human_description: str = "Rewrites a piece of text using the provided prompt."
    agent_description: str = "Used to rewrite a piece of text given a prompt. Takes text as input, and provides text as output."
 
    def run(self, tool_input: List[Block], context: AgentContext) -> Union[List[Block], Task[Any]]:
        pass

For now, tools should return lists of Blocks (opens in a new tab). Async support is coming soon.

  • The name field is the token that will be used by the ReACT LLM to request the tool.
  • The human_description is used for logging output for human consumption
  • The agent_description is used to tell the LLM how the tool should be used.
  • The run method returns Block objects instead of str (as with some other frameworks) in order to support multi-modal output.

The AgentContext object contains a copy of the Steamship Client (opens in a new tab) which is pre-authenticated into the workspace (opens in a new tab) in which your agent is running.

That means the tools you write can use it for:

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