The Tool Surface Designer
3 fill-in slots · from The AI Prompt Handbook for AI Agents & MCP
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0/3 filledThe Tool Surface Designer
Design the tool surface for an agent. Available capabilities: [LIST WHAT THE UNDERLYING SYSTEMS CAN DO] Tasks the agent must accomplish: [LIST] Systems of record: [WHAT IS AUTHORITATIVE FOR WHAT] Do NOT map capabilities to tools one-to-one. Produce: 1. The minimum tool set covering every task 2. For each tool: name, purpose, which tasks it serves, what it composes internally 3. Capabilities deliberately excluded, with reasoning 4. Composite tools — sequences that always occur together and should be a single call 5. Tools that should be split — anything doing two unrelated things 6. Which tools are read-only and which have side effects, clearly separated 7. Which side-effecting tools are reversible and which are not 8. Tasks that cannot be accomplished with this surface Design principles to apply: - Fewer tools with clear boundaries beat many tools with overlapping ones - A tool should map to something the agent decides to do, not to an implementation detail - Read and write should be separable so read-only agents are possible - Irreversible operations should be individually identifiable so they can be gated
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