Built-in tools

Built-in tools are the capabilities an agent has before you connect anything. They are grouped, and each group can be switched off for an individual agent.

When to use it

You rarely turn these on — they are on by default. You turn them off to narrow an agent. An agent that should only summarize what you paste into it does not need to fetch web pages; an agent that should never schedule anything does not need routine tools.

The groups

Group	What the agent can do
Artifacts	Save, list, read, update, and delete artifacts
Routines	Create and manage routines from inside a conversation
Memory	Remember, recall, update, and forget — see Memory
Projects	Read and update the project a conversation belongs to
Skill tools	Look through installed skills, use one, or author a new one
Visualization	Draw a chart or widget inline in the conversation
Web fetch	Read the contents of a URL
Utility	Precise arithmetic and the current time

Turning off Memory also stops the agent’s memory index being loaded at the start of a conversation — the group is the whole capability, not just the tools.

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Always on

A few tools are infrastructure for the conversation itself and cannot be turned off:

• Asking you a question — options or free text.
• Requesting a skill it has not been given.

An agent that could not ask you anything would guess instead, which is worse in every case.

Turning tools off is a tuning technique

Every advertised tool is one more thing the model weighs on each step. Removing groups an agent has no business using measurably sharpens its choices — this is one of the cheaper fixes on the iteration list.

Limits

• Built-in tools are per agent. Turning a group off for one agent does not affect others.
• Turning a group off applies to the agent’s next run.
• Built-in tools do not reach your accounts. Anything touching Gmail, Slack, Notion, or another service comes from a connector, not from here.
• Web fetch reads pages that are publicly reachable. It is not a browser and does not sign in anywhere.

Related

SkillsCapabilities you add, rather than ones that ship on.

Connectors overviewTools that reach your actual accounts.

Testing and iteratingWhere narrowing an agent's tools fits in tuning it.