Tools are how AI agents interact with the world. A well-designed tool is the difference between an agent that works and one that hallucinates, fails silently, or costs 10x more tokens than necessary. This skill covers tool design from schema to error handling. JSON Schema best practices, description writing that actually helps the LLM, validation, and the emerging MCP standard that's becoming the lingua franca for AI tools. Key insight: Tool descriptions are more important than tool implementa
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
Creating clear, unambiguous JSON Schema for tools
Using examples to guide LLM tool usage
Returning errors that help the LLM recover
Works well with: multi-agent-orchestration, api-designer, llm-architect, backend
Copy a source-pinned command for your client. You run it yourself.
Destination: .claude/skills/agent-tool-builder · pinned to the source commit
# Run from your project root
git clone https://github.com/davila7/claude-code-templates.git .skillboard-tmp
git -C .skillboard-tmp checkout 77b087e2153e35250cd3cc7c192218a2d990b6ed
mkdir -p ".claude/skills"
cp -r ".skillboard-tmp/cli-tool/components/skills/ai-research/agent-tool-builder" ".claude/skills/"
rm -rf .skillboard-tmpReview the source before running. This copies files into your project; it is not a one-click install and does not verify runtime safety.
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y gitnpm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code# Run from your project root
git clone https://github.com/davila7/claude-code-templates.git .skillboard-tmp
git -C .skillboard-tmp checkout 77b087e2153e35250cd3cc7c192218a2d990b6ed
mkdir -p ".claude/skills"
cp -r ".skillboard-tmp/cli-tool/components/skills/ai-research/agent-tool-builder" ".claude/skills/"
rm -rf .skillboard-tmpDestination: .claude/skills/agent-tool-builder
Scanner static-checks@0.1.0 · commit 77b087e2153e. Static checks cannot prove runtime safety – review the source and the exact diff before installing. How checks work.
No static rules matched. This is not a safety guarantee.