Agent Tools

Equip agents with functions and toolkits for external actions.

Agents use tools to take actions and interact with external systems.

Tools are functions that an Agent can run to achieve tasks. For example: searching the web, running SQL, sending an email or calling APIs. You can use any Python function as a tool or use a pre-built Agno toolkit.

The general syntax is:

from agno.agent import Agent

agent = Agent(
    # Add functions or Toolkits
    tools=[...],
)

The tools list can also be a callable factory, resolved at run time.

Using a Toolkit

Agno provides many pre-built toolkits that you can add to your Agents. For example, add the HackerNews toolkit to fetch tech news.

You can find more toolkits in the Toolkits guide.

1. Create News Agent

   Create a file news_agent.py

   news_agent.py

   from agno.agent import Agent
   from agno.tools.hackernews import HackerNewsTools
   
   agent = Agent(tools=[HackerNewsTools()], markdown=True)
   agent.print_response("What are the top stories on HackerNews?", stream=True)
   
2. Run the agent

   Install dependencies

   uv pip install openai agno
   

   Run the agent

   python news_agent.py
   

Writing your own Tools

For more control, write your own Python functions and add them as tools to an Agent. For example, here’s how to add a get_top_hackernews_stories tool to an Agent.

hn_agent.py

import json
import httpx

from agno.agent import Agent

def get_top_hackernews_stories(num_stories: int = 10) -> str:
    """Use this function to get top stories from Hacker News.

    Args:
        num_stories (int): Number of stories to return. Defaults to 10.
    """

    # Fetch top story IDs
    response = httpx.get('https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json')
    story_ids = response.json()

    # Fetch story details
    stories = []
    for story_id in story_ids[:num_stories]:
        story_response = httpx.get(f'https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/{story_id}.json')
        story = story_response.json()
        if "text" in story:
            story.pop("text", None)
        stories.append(story)
    return json.dumps(stories)

agent = Agent(tools=[get_top_hackernews_stories], markdown=True)
agent.print_response("Summarize the top 5 stories on HackerNews?", stream=True)

Read more about:

• Available toolkits
• Creating your own tools

Developer Resources

• Agent schema
• Cookbook