AWS demos agents that write their own tools at runtime with zero starting tools
AI Engineer · youtube · 2026-10-05
Sandhya Subramani, senior GenAI developer advocate at AWS, demoed meta-tooling with the open-source Strands Agents SDK at AI Engineer World's Fair 2026:
- Core idea: an agent starts with zero tools; when asked to do something it can't, it writes, loads, and uses a new tool at runtime without restarting. Only a system prompt describing what a good tool looks like plus three tools are needed: editor, shell, loadtool
- Self-assembling sub-agents: a travel planner demo builds its own sub-agents; covers swarm, graph, handoff, and workflow patterns
- Self-healing: fixes its own code at runtime—Strands even wrote its own TypeScript version this way
- Production readiness: evals for self-modifying agents (goal success, tool choice, parameters, inter-agent flow) and guardrails (sandboxing, constrained permissions, observability)
Chapter timestamps and Strands Agents GitHub links in the video description.
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