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Agents use tools to take actions and interact with external systems. Tools are functions that an Agent can run to achieve tasks. For example: searching the web, running SQL, sending an email or calling APIs. You can use any python function as a tool or use a pre-built Agno toolkit. The general syntax is: 
from agno.agent import Agent

agent = Agent(
    # Add functions or Toolkits
    tools=[...],
)
Tools can be a callable factory and are resolved at run time.

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Using a Toolkit

Agno provides many pre-built toolkits that you can add to your Agents. For example, let’s use the HackerNews toolkit to fetch tech news.
You can find more toolkits in the Toolkits guide.
1

Create News Agent

Create a file news_agent.py
news_agent.py
from agno.agent import Agent
from agno.tools.hackernews import HackerNewsTools

agent = Agent(tools=[HackerNewsTools()], markdown=True)
agent.print_response("What are the top stories on HackerNews?", stream=True)
2

Run the agent

Install dependencies
uv pip install openai agno
Run the agent
python news_agent.py

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Writing your own Tools

For more control, write your own python functions and add them as tools to an Agent. For example, here’s how to add a get_top_hackernews_stories tool to an Agent.
hn_agent.py
import json
import httpx

from agno.agent import Agent

def get_top_hackernews_stories(num_stories: int = 10) -> str:
    """Use this function to get top stories from Hacker News.

    Args:
        num_stories (int): Number of stories to return. Defaults to 10.
    """

    # Fetch top story IDs
    response = httpx.get('https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json')
    story_ids = response.json()

    # Fetch story details
    stories = []
    for story_id in story_ids[:num_stories]:
        story_response = httpx.get(f'https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/{story_id}.json')
        story = story_response.json()
        if "text" in story:
            story.pop("text", None)
        stories.append(story)
    return json.dumps(stories)

agent = Agent(tools=[get_top_hackernews_stories], markdown=True)
agent.print_response("Summarize the top 5 stories on hackernews?", stream=True)
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