Built In Agent Feature Gating

SKILL: Built-In Agent Feature Gating

Domain: agent-management Trigger: Use whenever agent registration should respect CLI entrypoints, SDK toggles, or feature flags before exposing the built-in catalog. Source Pattern: Distilled from reviewed built-in agent registration and feature-flagged runtime catalog implementations.

Core Method

Check entrypoint type, environment toggles, and feature flags before adding each built-in agent to the visible registry. Different entrypoints often need different built-in surfaces: a CLI may want planning or guidance agents, while an SDK or embedded runtime may want a minimal default set. Treat special orchestration modes as their own catalog variant rather than layering them on top of the normal list. This keeps built-in agents discoverable where they belong without leaking extra helpers into every runtime surface.

Key Rules

• Support an explicit “disable built-ins” toggle for SDK or embedded contexts that should expose a minimal surface.
• Treat coordination or orchestration modes as a separate built-in catalog rather than mixing them into the default list.
• Gate specialized built-ins behind feature flags or experiments instead of making them permanently visible.
• Keep the gating logic centralized so every entrypoint evaluates the same rules consistently.

Example Application

Before populating the agent registry, apply these checks so an SDK session can expose no built-ins, a CLI can expose planning or guidance agents when enabled, and a coordinator runtime can swap in its own worker-oriented catalog.

Anti-Patterns (What NOT to do)

• Don’t register all built-in agents unconditionally; ignoring entrypoints or env vars breaks SDK/CLI separation.
• Avoid hardcoding agent lists per mode; fold them into feature flags and helper functions to stay configurable.