{
  "practice": {
    "id": "prc_explain_when_to_use",
    "title": "Explain when to use the tool -- and when not to",
    "category": "scoping",
    "description": "Beyond describing what a tool does, a good description tells the model the situations that should trigger it, and explicitly calls out situations where a similar-looking tool should be used instead, to prevent the model from picking the wrong one of several overlapping tools.",
    "example_good": "\"Use this to search internal company documents. Do NOT use this for general web search -- use the web_search tool for that instead.\"",
    "example_bad": "\"Searches documents.\" (no guidance on which documents, or when to prefer a different search tool)",
    "source_note": "General best practice; several sites in this family (e.g. subagentskills.com's catalog) already apply an explicit \"do not use for X\" pattern in their own real skill descriptions.",
    "created_at": "2026-07-02 08:28:30",
    "cite_as": "https://subagentdescriptions.com/api/practices/prc_explain_when_to_use"
  }
}