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Tools

oterm supports integration with tools. Tools are special "functions" that can provide external information to the LLM model that it does not otherwise have access to.

With tools, you can provide the model with access to the web, run shell commands, perform RAG and more.

Use existing Model Context Protocol servers

or

create your own custom tools.

Custom tools with oterm

You can create your own custom tools and integrate them with oterm using Python entry points.

Create a python package

Create a python package that exports a callable function. The function's name, docstring, and type annotations are used to generate the tool definition for the model.

Here is an example of a simple tool that implements an Oracle:

def oracle(question: str) -> str:
    """Function to return the Oracle's answer to any question.

    Args:
        question: The question to ask.
    """
    return "oterm"

Register the tool as an entry point

In your package's pyproject.toml, register the tool under the oterm.tools entry-point group:

[project.entry-points."oterm.tools"]
oracle = "oracle.tool:oracle"

Install and use

Install the package in the same environment where oterm is installed:

cd oracle
uv pip install . # or pip install .

That's it! oterm discovers all tools registered under the oterm.tools entry-point group at startup. You can now select the tool when creating or editing a chat.

Built-in tools

The following tools are built-in to oterm and available by default:

  • think - provides the model with a way to think about a question before answering it. This is useful for complex questions that require reasoning. Use it for adding a "thinking" step to the model's response.
  • date_time - provides the current date and time in ISO format.
  • shell - allows you to run shell commands and use the output as input to the model. Obviously this can be dangerous, so use with caution.
  • generate_image - generates an image from a text prompt using an Ollama image-generation model (e.g. x/z-image-turbo, x/flux2-klein). The default model is x/z-image-turbo; override it for a single call via the tool's model argument or globally via the OTERM_OLLAMA_IMAGE_MODEL environment variable. The image renders inline in the chat. Requires an Ollama server with an image-capable model installed; the host LLM (any provider) writes the prompt and calls the tool.

Tool calls in the chat

When the model invokes a tool during a response, oterm renders the call inline as a collapsible entry between any "thoughts" and the response itself:

▸ tool call: search_repo

Click the line (or its arrow) to expand it. The expanded body shows:

  • args: — the arguments the model passed to the tool. Dictionaries and JSON-encoded strings are pretty-printed with syntax highlighting; plain strings are shown verbatim and truncated if very long.
  • result: — the value the tool returned, formatted the same way. Appears once the tool has finished.

Click again to collapse. Multiple calls within the same turn each get their own entry.