User guide

Where the agent's abilities come from

The agent just did something, and you want to know what governs it. Every tool it can use came from one of three places, and they are controlled completely differently.

When XataWorks says it is going to use a tool, that tool came from one of three places. They look similar in the transcript and they are governed completely differently, so it is worth two minutes to learn to tell them apart. Almost every question you will have later — why was I asked about this, why can it do that here but not there, how do I give it one more thing — is really a question about which of the three you are looking at.

Three sources, one conversation. What the agent can do at any moment is the union of the three — which is why the answer to “why can it do that here?” is always “which of these did it come from?”

The three, side by side

	Bundled tools	Page tools	Connections
Where it comes from	Ships inside XataWorks	Offered by a website you have open	A server you added
Who decided it exists	Whoever built XataWorks	Whoever built that website	You
What it can reach	Whatever it was written to reach	That page, as you, signed in as you	Whatever that server can reach
How you control it	Approve a call; that is all	Site permissions, per agent and per site	Enable, disable or remove the connection

Why the difference matters

Bundled tools are the least surprising. They came with the application, they do a fixed set of things, and the only decision left to you is whether to allow a particular call.

Page tools are the most surprising, because the website is an active participant. A page you have open can publish a set of actions to your agent — search these tickets, create this issue, refund this order — and those actions run in your browser, as you, already signed in. That is what makes them powerful and it is exactly why XataWorks asks before running one. The website chose what to publish, and a website is not a party you have any reason to trust by default.

Connections sit in between. You added the server, so you chose the capability, but the server itself is somebody else’s software running with whatever access you gave it. You control it at the connection level: turn it off and every tool it contributed disappears.

Telling which one you are looking at

In the transcript, a run names the tool and where it ran. The reliable tells:

A page tool names a browser tab. If the run mentions a tab or a site, that is what it is.
A connection’s tool appears as soon as that connection is connected and vanishes when you disable it — which is the quickest way to confirm a suspicion.
Everything else is bundled.

A chat transcript, cropped to the chat column, over the helpdesk. The question reads “Read Larkspur ticket LK-4417 and tell me who raised it.” Below it a run reading “Reading skill”, the assistant saying it will look the ticket up, a folded group reading “4 tools”, and then the answer: the ticket was raised by Brightwood Joinery, a table of its fields, and two notes the assistant drew from the team's triage skill. At the bottom a meter reading 4% of context with a Compact button. — One answered turn. Each thing the assistant ran is a line in the transcript: singly when it runs one, folded into a count when it runs several, and openable either way. This is a real answer from a real model, so its wording would differ if the capture were taken again.

A fourth thing, which is not a tool

A skill is instructions, not capability. It tells the agent how your team does something; it does not let the agent do anything it could not already do. If what you need is a new ability, you want a connection or a page tool. If what you need is for the agent to stop getting a procedure wrong, you want a skill — see Skills.

If you are ever unsure what the agent can currently do, two places will tell you without your having to ask it: the Tools entry in the chat header’s ⋮ menu lists every page tool available right now, and the Connections section of Preferences lists every connection with what it is contributing.

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