[EPIC] Tools

[EItanya]

Description

Tools are one of the most important aspects of agentic systems, and much thought and work has been done by the community lately to improve the proliferation and availability of tools.

Projects like mcp by Anthropic have done a wonderful job of allowing people from all over to share tools with each other over a simple protocol.

kagent is in a unique position to make tool use/discovery even easier because we're kubernetes native, and have access to all the services already running in your cluster.

Tool Discovery

As mentioned, kagent is already running inside of a kubernetes cluster, and as such we can take advantage of the fact that all services within said cluster are potentially reachable automatically. Using mechanisms like, mcp, OpenAPI, or gRPC, kagent can discover applications already running, and expose them directly as tools to the consumer. This could be done automatically via a label/annotation on a Service, or via a CRD.

Side Note:

This can potentially work for Agents as well, but there aren't as many protocols for that kind of thing, but as they emerge we will absolutely interface with them.

Expose our built-in tools as an MCP server

In order to prove kagent's value, we created a large set of devops/kubernetes native tooling build directly into the project. We could expose these as an MCP server from kagent and allow users of Claude or other MCP clients to consume them directly.

[ilackarms]

It would be great if we exposed an endpoint in autogenstudio so that the controller can fetch descriptions of all the builtin tools as well as tools discovered by mcp.
This would allow the controller to add the tool descriptions to the user-defined system prompts (doing so manually seems to make the agents more effective at using their tools)

[peterj]

We have endpoints for that. For discovering MCP tools (/tools/discover):

class McpToolParams(BaseModel):
    type: Literal["stdio", "sse"]
    server_params: SseServerParams | StdioServerParams


@router.post("/discover")
async def resolve_mcp_tool(params: McpToolParams):

And /tools to get all tols.

[peterj]

Note that the /tools endpoint only returns the built-in tools. We need to think about storing the discovered MCP tools and/or the MCP endpoints only and then do discovery as a separate step. So the users could add MCP servers and then use the tools that are discovered from those servers.