What it does
The Manage Agents tool gives agents awareness of the other agents in their organization. Agents can list all available agents, create new ones, and update existing configurations — all through a single tool with anaction parameter.
This is especially powerful when paired with Call Agent: an agent can discover what’s available, then make an informed decision about which agent to delegate to.
Key features
- Discover agents: List all agents in the org with their names, IDs, descriptions, tools, tags, and stage
- Create agents: Build new agents with a name, system prompt, model, and tools — no UI needed
- Update agents: Modify an existing agent’s description, system prompt, model, tools, or stage
- Self-awareness: The calling agent is marked with
isCurrentAgent: truein list results
Parameters
The
model field uses the provider:model-id format — bare names like "claude-sonnet-4-6" or date-stamped Anthropic API IDs like "claude-sonnet-4-20250514" are rejected. See Choosing a Model > Model Identifiers for the full list of accepted strings.Common use cases
Agent discovery for call_agent
“What agents are available in our org that I could delegate research tasks to?” The agent lists all agents, inspects their tools and descriptions, and recommends the best fit before calling it.Dynamic agent creation
“Create a new agent called ‘Daily Digest Bot’ that uses search_google and send_email to compile daily news summaries” The agent creates a fully configured agent — ready to use immediately in development stage.Updating agent configuration
“Add the execute_python tool to agent 42 and update its description” The agent updates the target agent’s tools and metadata. Existing tool configs (like callable agent IDs) are preserved when tools are updated.Organizing agents with tags
“Review the agents in this org and group them by team and function” The agent lists every agent withincludeUsage: true to see what’s actually used, checks list_tags for names that already exist, then sets tags on each agent. Those tags become the categories people browse in the agent picker and in Control Hub → Agents. rename_tag and delete_tag let it tidy up afterwards — a delete has to state how many agents it will untag, so a stale view of the org can’t wipe associations by accident.
Self-replicating workflows
An orchestrator agent can create specialized sub-agents on the fly, configure them with the right tools and prompts, then call them viacall_agent — all in a single conversation.
Value & ROI (optional)
The optionalvalueRule field quantifies what an agent’s work is worth, so the platform can show estimated value and ROI next to the cost it already computes for every run. It’s entirely optional — most agents leave it unset, and when it’s unset no value or ROI is shown (never a misleading $0).
The rule has two trigger types:
Pass
valueRule: null on update to remove a rule. Value shows up per-conversation in the Inbox and rolls up (with ROI) on the Analytics dashboard.
How tool assignment works
When creating or updating agents, pass tool names as simple strings in thetoolNames array. The platform automatically:
- Resolves each name to its full schema definition
- Adds companion tools (e.g.,
search_knowledge_baseautomatically addsread_fileandlist_kb_files) - Preserves existing tool-specific configs (like
callableAgentIds) on update - Validates tool names and returns an error for any unrecognized tools
What you get back
List response
Usage (with includeUsage)
Each agent in the list response gains a usage object for the window. Agents with no activity get zeros rather than being omitted — “never used” is exactly the signal a cleanup pass is looking for.
null — not 0 — when some tokens ran on a model with no pricing entry, and unpricedModels names which.
Tag responses
list_tags returns { totalTags, tags: [{ id, name, agentCount }] }. rename_tag returns the tag with its previousName; renaming onto a name another tag already uses is refused with that tag’s ID so you can merge instead. delete_tag returns { id, name, untaggedAgents }.
Create / Update response
Best practices
- List before you call: Use
action: "list"to discover agent names and IDs before usingcall_agent, rather than guessing - New agents start in development: Created agents always start in
developmentstage — promote toreleasedviaupdatewhen ready - Tool names from existing agents: If you’re unsure which tool names are valid, list an existing agent to see its tool names
- Preserve tool configs on update: When updating tools, the platform preserves existing configs (like
callableAgentIds) for tools that remain in the set
Related tools
- Call Agent - Call other agents after discovering them with
manage_agents - Manage Scheduled Tasks - Schedule recurring tasks on agents you’ve created
- Load Skill - Load specialized skills into agents