Agent tools

Agent Building

Agent tools is an Agent Skill for agent building published in the carbon-language/carbon-lang repository on GitHub: a SKILL.md instruction file an AI agent can load to do this task.

Guidelines and restrictions on shell commands and file manipulation tools for AI assistants.

View on GitHub ↗

QUICK START

How to use this skill

Bring this guide into your coding agent with a prompt tailored to the tool you use.

Open your project in Codex.
Copy and paste the prompt below.
Review files and risks before approving any action.

Prompt to paste

Inspect the Agent Skill at https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/HEAD/.agents/skills/agent_tools/SKILL.md and all supporting files. Report provenance, permissions, scripts, dependencies, and security risks. Propose an exact installation into .agents/skills/agent-tools, but wait for my approval before writing files or running scripts.

Copying this prompt does not install or run the skill. Review third-party files before use.

Agent tools

AI assistants working on the Carbon repository MUST NOT use legacy or generic UNIX shell search/edit commands when specialized environment tools exist.

Command line tools restrictions

DO NOT USE: cat, less, grep, sed, or other shell utilities for viewing, searching, or modifying files.
DO NOT USE: patch to write and apply patch files.
DO NOT USE: Writing custom scripts in other languages to circumvent this limitation.
DO USE: High-fidelity semantic API tools:
- Viewing: Use view_file instead of cat / less.
- Searching: Use grep_search / find_by_name instead of grep / find.
- Modifying: Use replace_file_content, multi_replace_file_content, or write_to_file instead of sed / patch / python edits.

You may only write and run temporary programs to modify source code if no semantic tool is applicable or when performing complex, systematic transforms across many codebase directories simultaneously.

Temporary files management

Temporary files and scratchpad test scripts created by the assistant during analysis, experiments, or debugging:

MUST reside within the tmp/ subdirectory under the workspace root.
MUST be periodically cleaned out and deleted before ending your turn to preserve a clean git workspace.