---
title: Frontend Tools
icon: "lucide/Wrench"
description: Let your agent interact with and update your application's UI.
snippet_cell: frontend-tools
---

<InlineDemo demo="frontend-tools" />

## What is this?

Frontend tools let your agent define and invoke client-side functions that run entirely in the user's browser. Because the handler executes on the frontend, it has direct access to component state, browser APIs, and any third-party UI library the page already uses. That's how an agent can "reach into" the app: update React state, trigger animations, read `localStorage`, pop a toast, or steer the user's view.

This page covers the "agent drives the UI" shape of frontend tools. The same primitive also powers Generative UI and Human-in-the-loop; see those pages for interaction patterns.

## When should I use this?

Use frontend tools when your agent needs to:

- Read or modify React component state
- Access browser APIs like `localStorage`, `sessionStorage`, or cookies
- Trigger UI updates, animations, or transitions
- Show alerts, toasts, or notifications
- Interact with third-party frontend libraries
- Perform anything that requires the user's immediate browser context

## How it works in code

<FrameworkSetup concept="frontend-tools-setup" />

Register a frontend tool with `useFrontendTool`. Give it a name, a Zod schema for parameters, and a handler. The agent can then call it like any other tool and your frontend runs it in the browser.

<Snippet region="frontend-tool-registration" title="frontend/src/app/page.tsx — useFrontendTool" />

The handler receives the parsed, type-safe parameters and can do anything
the browser can: update state, call an API, touch the DOM. Its return value
is sent back to the agent as the tool result so the model can reason about
what happened.

<Snippet region="frontend-tool-handler" title="frontend/src/app/page.tsx — handler body" />

<IntegrationGrid path="frontend-tools" />
