Patterns for Agentic Tools: Your agents are only as good as your tools

The Moment Every few years, a new pattern language emerges that changes how we build software. In 1994, the Gang of Four gave us Design Patterns. In 2003, Hohpe and Woolf gave us Enterprise Integration Patterns . Since then: Microservices Patterns , Cloud Patterns, and now Agent Patterns. But there's a gap. Agents can chat and reason on their own — but they can't 'act' without tools. Standards like MCP have unlocked how agents discover and call tools. The protocol layer is solved. What's missing is the design layer: patterns for building tools that agents can actually use well. That's the missing layer. What We Learned We've built over 8000 tools across 100+ integrations — the largest catalog of agent-ready tools in production. Not API wrappers. Production-grade tools that handle the edge cases: rate limits, pagination, auth refresh, partial failures. Every mistake you can make: unclear descriptions, unhelpful errors, parameters that made sense to us but not to an LLM, we've made it. W