Tools & Actions¶

What is a tool?¶

A tool is a function the agent can call to interact with the external world. It has:

A name (used by the LLM to reference it)
A description (tells the LLM when and how to use it)
A typed signature (arguments and return type)

Defining a tool with smolagents¶

from smolagents import tool

@tool
def get_weather(city: str) -> str:
    """Return current weather for a given city.

    Args:
        city: Name of the city, e.g. 'Paris'.
    """
    # ... call a weather API ...
    return f"Sunny, 22°C in {city}"

The @tool decorator automatically extracts the JSON schema from the docstring and type hints, so the LLM knows exactly how to call it.

Tool categories¶

Category	Examples
Information retrieval	Web search, Wikipedia lookup, RAG
Computation	Python REPL, calculator
I/O	File read/write, email, calendar
External services	APIs, databases
Perception	Image captioning, OCR

Notes¶

Add your own notes and tool experiments here.