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As you bind more capabilities the tool list grows. Tool presentation controls what the consuming model actually sees. Set it on an agent under Advanced → Tool presentation, and on a gateway under Tool Presentation.

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The four modes

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Adaptive

Resolves at session open: below 30 customer-bound tools it serves Direct; at or above 30 it serves Discovery. It never resolves to Unified — that is an explicit authoring choice, not something a tool count should produce. Leave it here unless you have a reason not to.

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Discovery

Three meta-tools: The underlying tools are not directly callable in this mode. A call has to go through execute_tool, validated against the snapshot the session opened with. Good for large surfaces: the model spends context on the tools it is actually reaching for rather than on all of them.

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Direct

Everything listed individually. Lowest latency to a call and the easiest to reason about. Right for a small, deliberate tool set.

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Unified

One unified_tool. The model describes what it wants in natural language; a discovery layer picks the tool and the arguments. A match below a confidence threshold is refused rather than guessed. This is the natural-language-dispatcher pattern. Choose it deliberately — it puts an extra model call in front of every tool use.

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System tools are always direct

Whatever mode you pick, system-tool surfaces are appended directly. Skills, journal search, scheduling, and workflow tools are always callable by name.

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On a gateway

The same four modes apply, and the platform default is the same. Two gateway specifics:
  • Tools withheld for lack of a workspace anchor are removed from the discovery corpus as well as from tools/list, so Discovery mode cannot reach them either.
  • Because a gateway session is stateless, tools/call reconstructs the presentation snapshot per request from the gateway’s current mode and bindings — the same list tools/list would render.

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Choosing

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