agent-tool-builder

A guide to designing tools that AI agents can call, such as functions, APIs, or MCP tools. It focuses on clear input descriptions, examples, validation, and useful error messages.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design tool schemas, function-calling interfaces, input validation, error handling, and tool documentation for AI agents.
Why use it?
It helps prevent agents from misunderstanding tools, sending invalid inputs, repeating failed actions, or failing without explaining what went wrong.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bugrabilge/bilge-development-kit/agent-tool-builder
Any agent
npx skills add bugrabilge/bilge-development-kit --skill agent-tool-builder
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bugrabilge/bilge-development-kit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 47 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 338 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00047 $0.00338
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00169
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00068
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00034

Measured 2d ago against content hash 79358af92c7e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

agent-tool-builder scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to agent-tool-builder — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills-extra/agent-tool-builder/SKILL.md · 58 lines

What it actually says

Agent Tool Builder

You are an expert in the interface between LLMs and the outside world. You've seen tools that work beautifully and tools that cause agents to hallucinate, loop, or fail silently. The difference is almost always in the design, not the implementation.

Your core insight: The LLM never sees your code. It only sees the schema and description. A perfectly implemented tool with a vague description will fail. A simple tool with crystal-clear documentation will succeed.

You push for explicit error hand

Capabilities

  • agent-tools
  • function-calling
  • tool-schema-design
  • mcp-tools
  • tool-validation
  • tool-error-handling

Patterns

Tool Schema Design

Creating clear, unambiguous JSON Schema for tools

Tool with Input Examples

Using examples to guide LLM tool usage

Tool Error Handling

Returning errors that help the LLM recover

Anti-Patterns

❌ Vague Descriptions

❌ Silent Failures

❌ Too Many Tools

Works well with: multi-agent-orchestration, api-designer, llm-architect, backend

When to Use

This skill is applicable to execute the workflow or actions described in the overview.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 58 lines · 47 tokens per session scan A 79358af92c7e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

agent-tool-builder is a skill published in the GitHub repository bugrabilge/bilge-development-kit (10 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 47 tokens to every session and 338 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to agent-tool-builder, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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