Can I Use Agents?

3 min read Original article ↗

hooks

Hooks & Lifecycle

Agent extensibility via lifecycle hooks — intercept, observe, and control agent behavior at key points in the workflow

10 features

Session lifecycle management

Hooks for session start and end — initialize environment, load context, clean up resources, or log session activity

Generic tool use hooks

Pre and post hooks around any tool execution — inspect, modify, block, or log tool calls

Subagent lifecycle

Hooks for when subagents are spawned and when they complete — observe delegation, aggregate results, enforce policies

Control shell commands

Dedicated hooks for intercepting shell/terminal command execution — block dangerous commands, audit, or inject env vars

Control file access

Dedicated hooks for file read and write operations — enforce access policies, trigger linting, or audit file changes

Validate prompts before submission

Intercept user prompts before they reach the model — block, rewrite, redact, annotate, or inject context

Control MCP tool use

Dedicated hooks for MCP server tool invocations — audit, restrict, or modify MCP tool calls independently from built-in tools

Observe compaction window

Hooks that fire before and after context window compaction — preserve critical state, log what gets summarized, or block compaction

Agent complete (stop)

Hook that fires when the agent finishes a turn — implement quality gates, force continuation, or trigger follow-up workflows

Agent response tracking

Observe and react to the agent's responses — log output, track thinking, or trigger side effects after each message

instructions

Instructions

How you tell the agent what to do — persistent guidance files, scoping, and cross-agent compatibility

6 features

mcp

Model Context Protocol

MCP client support — transports, server primitives, client features, and configuration

12 features

memory

Memory

How the agent persists its own knowledge and manages the constraint of limited context

3 features

tools

Built-in Tools

Native tools and capabilities the agent ships with out of the box

16 features

File read

Read file contents from the local filesystem

File edit / write

Create, modify, and overwrite files

Notebook editing

Read and edit Jupyter notebook (.ipynb) cells

Code search

Search file contents by pattern, regex, or filename glob

Shell execution

Execute shell commands in the user's environment

Background monitor

Run a process in the background and react to its output (tail logs, poll status)

Scheduled tasks

Schedule recurring or one-shot prompts within a session (cron-like)

Web search

Search the web for information

Web fetch

Fetch and read the contents of a URL

Image input

Read and understand images and screenshots (multimodal input)

Image generation

Generate images from text descriptions

Browser control

Programmatic browser interaction: take screenshots, navigate pages, click elements

LSP integration

Language server features: go-to-definition, find references, type errors, symbol search

Semantic search

Search codebase by meaning using embeddings or indexing, not just exact matches

Subagent spawning

Spawn sub-agents with their own context window to handle tasks in parallel

Task management

Track work progress with task lists and checklists within a session