Skip to content

Tools

altimate includes built-in tools that agents use to interact with your codebase and environment.

Built-in Tools

Tool Description
bash Execute shell commands
read Read file contents
edit Edit files with find-and-replace
write Create or overwrite files
glob Find files by pattern
grep Search file contents with regex
list List directory contents
patch Apply multi-file patches
lsp Language server operations (diagnostics, completions)
webfetch Fetch and process web pages
websearch Search the web
question Ask the user a question
todo_read Read task list
todo_write Create/update tasks
skill Execute a skill

Data Engineering Tools

In addition to built-in tools, altimate provides 100+ specialized data engineering tools. See the Data Engineering Tools section for details.

Tool Permissions

Control which tools agents can use via the permission system. For full details, pattern-based rules, and recommended configurations, see the Permissions reference.

Tool Behavior

Bash Tool

The bash tool executes shell commands in the project directory. Commands run in a non-interactive shell with the user's environment.

Read / Write / Edit Tools

File tools respect the project boundaries and permission settings:

  • read — Reads file contents, supports line ranges
  • write — Creates or overwrites entire files
  • edit — Surgical find-and-replace edits within files

LSP Tool

When LSP servers are configured, the lsp tool provides:

  • Diagnostics (errors, warnings)
  • Go-to-definition
  • Hover information
  • Completions

Tool Retrieval

With the full data-engineering toolset (~78 tools), sending every tool definition on every turn floods the context window and adds distractors that hurt the model's tool selection. Tool retrieval trims the exposed set per turn to a relevant subset, cutting input tokens substantially at the same task quality.

It is off by default and enabled with an environment variable:

ALTIMATE_TOOL_RETRIEVAL=1 altimate-code run "..."

When enabled, each turn exposes:

  • an always-on core set of essentials that are never trimmed (bash, read, write, edit, glob, grep, list, task, todowrite, skill),
  • any tool already referenced by an in-flight tool call (so a mid-trajectory tool is never dropped), and
  • the highest-scoring remaining tools by a deterministic lexical match against the turn's request, up to a fixed budget.

Selection is deterministic and dependency-free; small tool sets are left untouched (nothing to gain). In internal benchmarks this cut input tokens by ~50% at an identical task-resolution rate.