Tools: Powerful Code-only Agent

If you're building an agent, you're probably overwhelmed. Tools. MCP. Subagents. Skills. The ecosystem pushes you toward complexity, toward "the right way" to do things. You should know: Concepts like "Skills" and "MCP" are actually outcomes of an ongoing learning process of humans figuring stuff out. The space is wide open for exploration. With this mindset I wanted to try something different. Simplify the assumptions.

What if the agent only had one tool? Not just any tool, but the most powerful one. The Turing-complete one: execute code.

Truly one tool means: no `bash`, no `ls`, no `grep`. Only execute_code. And you enforce it.

When you watch an agent run, you might think: "I wonder what tools it'll use to figure this out. Oh look, it ran `ls`. That makes sense. Next, `grep`. Cool."

The simpler Code-Only paradigm makes that question irrelevant. The question shifts from "what tools?" to "what code will it produce?" And that's when things get interesting.

> Agent, do thing > Agent responds with thing

> Agent, do thing > Agent creates and runs code to do thing

It does this every time. No, really, every time. Pick a runtime for our Code-Only agent, say Python. It needs to find a file? It writes Python code to find the file and executes the code. Maybe it runs rglob. Maybe it does os.walk.

It needs to create a script that crawls a website? It doesn't write the script to your filesystem (reminder: there's no create_file tool to do that!). It writes code to output a script that crawls a website.1

We make it so that there is literally no way for the agent to do anything productive without writing code.

Source: HackerNews