additive-agent-tool-surface-construction

additive-agent-tool-surface-construction is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ychampion/cskill-agents. It costs 34 tokens per session (387 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for adding tools from newly connected MCP servers to an agent's existing tool collection. MCP servers provide tools and data that an agent can call.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when combining a parent agent's tools with tools discovered by a child agent, while retaining cleanup and connection information.
Why use it?
It prevents newly added connections from replacing tools or client handles that the agent already needs.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Good fit Use it when combining a parent agent's tools with tools discovered by a child agent, while retaining cleanup and connection information.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ychampion/cskill-agents/additive-agent-tool-surface-construction
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.

Any agent
npx skills add ychampion/cskill-agents --skill additive-agent-tool-surface-construction
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ychampion/cskill-agents

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for additive-agent-tool-surface-construction

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ychampion/cskill-agents/additive-agent-tool-surface-construction.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ychampion/cskill-agents/additive-agent-tool-surface-construction)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ychampion/cskill-agents/additive-agent-tool-surface-construction"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ychampion/cskill-agents/additive-agent-tool-surface-construction.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 387 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found 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 5.1 $0.00034 $0.00387
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00193
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00077
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00039

Measured 8d ago against content hash e319ac3f07d0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

additive-agent-tool-surface-construction 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 8d 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.

agents/claude-code/skills/additive-agent-tool-surface-construction/SKILL.md · 28 lines

What it actually says

SKILL: Additive Agent Tool Surface Construction

Domain: tool-surface Trigger: Use this when bringing tools from newly connected MCP servers into the agent’s tool pool while preserving the parent context. Source Pattern: Distilled from reviewed subagent orchestration, isolation, and lifecycle implementations.

Core Method

When a child agent connects extra integrations, treat those capabilities as additions layered over the parent surface rather than as a replacement. Keep the parent client handles intact, append the agent-owned clients, and merge the newly discovered tool definitions alongside the inherited tool pool. Pass the merged clients, merged tools, and the child-owned cleanup handle downstream as one package so later stages can use the expanded surface without mutating the parent session.

Key Rules

  • Always start with parent clients and append agent clients in order to avoid losing existing handles that the session still needs.
  • Maintain agent tools separately so the agent can union them with the parent’s command/skill catalog without overwriting it.
  • Return both the merged clients and tools along with the cleanup closure so callers can pass them downstream transparently.
  • Log the before/after counts to aid debugging when tools disappear unexpectedly.

Example Application

When a sub-agent launches with extra MCP servers, use this pattern so it keeps the parent integrations it inherited while also gaining the newly connected agent-specific tools.

Anti-Patterns (What NOT to do)

  • Don’t replace the parent client list with just the agent’s clients; that loses the original MCP endpoints.
  • Don’t forget to pass the merged tools through the helper that runs the forked agent, or the new MCP servers will appear to succeed but never expose their tools.
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. 8d ago First seen · 28 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A e319ac3f07d0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

additive-agent-tool-surface-construction is a skill published in the GitHub repository ychampion/cskill-agents (36 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 387 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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