# Practical ways to use the Claude Agent SDK 🔍 Manage hundreds to thousands of tools efficiently by loading only what's needed on demand. Tool Search loads only the required tools at runtime instead of pre-loading a massive tool catalog into the context. 📌 Title: Tool Search for Scaling to Many Tools 🔗 URL: 🧩 Overview `ENABLE_TOOL_SEARCH=auto` automatically enables tool search when tool definitions would overwhelm the context. Prevents the 10-20K token cost of 50 tools and the accuracy degradation beyond 30-50 tools. 🛠 How to use it ```bash export ENABLE_TOOL_SEARCH=auto:5 # Enable when tools exceed 5% of context ``` 🏗 Practical usage - When connecting enterprise MCP servers with hundreds of tools, use on-demand search to prevent context bloat. - `auto:5` auto-decides: "enable tool search if tool definitions exceed 5% of context." For small setups (<10 tools), `false` with pre-loading is faster. - Optimize tool discovery by adding specific keywords to descriptions like "Search Slack messages by keyword, channel, and date range." 💡 Use cases 🏢 Large-scale MCP server tool management 💰 Token cost optimization 🎯 Maintaining tool selection accuracy ⚠️ Watch out Requires Claude Sonnet 4 / Opus 4 or later (no Haiku support). Catalog limit is 10,000 tools, returning 3-5 per search. Disabled by default on Vertex AI and third-party `ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL`. #ClaudeAgentSDK# #AI#