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Tool Reference

Tools are the capabilities available to the agent during a session. Some tools run silently; others require your approval before they execute, unless a permission rule says otherwise.

File I/O​

Read​

Read text files, images, and PDFs. Long lines are returned in full rather than clipped.

PDFs are processed client-side — pages are rendered locally and their embedded text extracted, with no network round-trip — and reads are bounded to a page range so large documents can be read in chunks.

When the active model has no vision support, reading an image returns its metadata (type and dimensions) instead of the image itself, so the agent knows the file exists and can inspect it programmatically.

Write​

Create or overwrite a file. Requires approval.

Edit​

Make exact string replacements in a file. Requires approval.

When the agent issues several Edit/Write calls for the same file in one batch, they run one at a time in call order, so later edits always see the result of earlier ones. Calls touching different files still run in parallel.

Glob​

Find files by glob pattern.

Grep​

Search file contents with regular expressions.

Shell​

Bash​

Execute shell commands. Each call runs in a fresh non-interactive process — shell state does not persist between calls. Long-running commands (servers, watchers, slow builds) can be launched in the background; the agent gets back paths it can read for status and output, and can stop the process by its pid. A trailing & on a background command is redundant and is stripped automatically. Requires approval.

Builtin​

Agent​

Spawn a sub-agent to handle a task autonomously. The agent picks which sub-agent to delegate to based on the task.

TodoWrite​

Track progress on multi-step work with a task list.

WebFetch​

Fetch a URL, convert it to markdown, and have a small model extract what's relevant. An oversized response is spilled to a local cache file the agent can read in slices, instead of being truncated. Requires approval.

WebSearch​

Search the web and return results with citations. Requires approval. Uses the provider's native web search, so it is available only on a provider that advertises supports_web_search (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Grok, OpenRouter, Antix, and Ali Coding Plan). On those providers it is added to the tool set automatically; on others it is not offered.

Opt-in tools​

These are not enabled by default. Turn them on with --include-tools.

ViewImage​

Read and analyze an image with a natural-language instruction.

PTY​

Drive a persistent shared tmux session — useful for interactive programs and full-screen TUI apps where state needs to carry across calls. Requires tmux.

Browser​

Drive a Chromium browser for navigation, content extraction, and automation. The agent typically takes a snapshot of the page to find interactive elements, then clicks or types into them. Requires approval, and only available when Ante is built with the browser cargo feature.

MCP tools​

Tools provided by configured MCP servers are exposed to the agent as mcp__<server>__<tool>. They appear alongside built-in tools and behave identically from the agent's perspective. MCP tools obey the same --tools/--include-tools/--exclude-tools filtering as built-in tools, so a restrictive --tools base that doesn't name them will strip them; filter per server with enabled_tools instead.

Default tool set​

By default Ante enables Read, Bash, Grep, Glob, TodoWrite, WebFetch, Edit, Write, and Agent. Browser is also included when Ante is built with the browser feature. WebSearch is added automatically when the session's provider supports native web search.

ViewImage and PTY are opt-in.

Tool filtering​

Control which tools are available in a session:

# Replace the default tool set with exactly these tools
ante --tools Read Glob Grep "analyze the code"

# Add opt-in tools on top of the default set
ante --include-tools PTY "drive the project TUI"

# Remove these tools
ante --exclude-tools Bash Write "read-only analysis"

Supports ToolMatcher syntax for fine-grained control:

# Allow Bash but only for specific patterns
ante --tools "Read" "Bash(cargo test)" "Bash(cargo clippy)"