Explain when to use the tool -- and when not to
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.
good example
"Use this to search internal company documents. Do NOT use this for general web search -- use the web_search tool for that instead."
bad example
"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.
provenance
created 2026-07-02 08:28:30 · JSON