Let your agent learn looot with skills
When an agent should call the free skills tool, a four-step example from a list of companies to work emails, and why guides served over MCP have no sign-up step.
skills is a free MCP tool that hands an agent a short guide for the task in
front of it: which job to run, what to ask the user for, and what to do on a miss. It costs nothing
and needs no balance, so an agent can call it before every unfamiliar task.
When an agent should call it
- The user asks for something new, and the agent does not know which job or endpoint does it.
- A run came back in a way the agent did not expect: no email found,
queued,insufficient_balance, a provider error, a price higher than the user expected. - The task is a batch, such as a list of companies or people. The batch guide says when to stop and ask.
Call it with a query in plain words. Call it with no arguments to see the index, or with a
slug from the index or a search to read one full guide.
Example: work emails for a list of companies
The user asks
“Find the work email of the head of marketing at each of these 30 SaaS companies.”
The agent searches the guides
skills {"query": "work email for a list of companies"}The answer ranks the email guides first (use-cases/domain-email-search,
agent-skills/find-professional-emails), then three edge cases: edge-cases/no-email-found,
edge-cases/batch-over-100-calls and edge-cases/verify-email-after-finding.
The agent reads the guide
skills {"slug": "agent-skills/find-professional-emails"}The answer carries the job ids the guide names in jobIds (here people.email.find) and the
guide as markdown: what to ask the user for, the steps, and what to do on a miss. Its header says to
prefer one run of job:<id> with fallback: true, so looot picks the provider and tries the next
on a miss.
The agent runs one call first
The agent reads the live prices of the job’s providers, then runs one company with the job and
fallback, and shows the user the result and its cost:
search_catalog {"filters": {"capability": "people.email.find"}}run {"endpointId": "job:people.email.find", "input": {"first_name": "Jane", "last_name": "Doe", "domain": "example.com"}, "idempotencyKey": "email-jane-doe-1", "fallback": true}30 companies can need a call to find each person and another to find
each email. Past 100 calls, the edge-cases/batch-over-100-calls guide says to ask the user first,
with the number of calls and the total price, and to check balance before
the batch.
A miss on one person is a normal answer, not an error: edge-cases/no-email-found tells the agent
to check the domain, run the job with fallback, and say plainly that no email was found.
Why guides over MCP have no sign-up step
Most of the 415 use case guides start as the skill.md of a page on looot.ai: an alternatives page,
a use case, a recipe, a free tool or an MCP page. On the website that file has a Setup section with a
sign-up link and looot login, for a human who is not connected yet. Over MCP the skills tool drops
that section, because an agent that can call skills is already connected. The header in front of
each guide says so. To check: none of the 415 guides in
src/modules/agent-guides/useCaseGuides.generated.json contains a ## Setup section, looot login
or an onboarding?src= link.
The ChatGPT profile serves its own wording of each guide, with no sign-up steps and only that
profile’s tools. See skills.