What does “Tool” mean?

Notion seems to use Tool in two related senses: a broad product sense and a more technical, agent-centric sense.

1. Tool as an application or service

In user-facing language, Notion calls products like Slack, Gmail, GitHub, Figma, Linear, Google Drive, Dropbox, ChatGPT, and Claude tools.

In this sense:

A tool is an application or service that people use to get work done.

For example, GitHub is a tool, Slack is a tool, and Gmail is a tool.

This is probably the more natural meaning for a top-level product concept.

2. Tool as an agent capability

Notion also seems to use Tool in a fairly agent-centric, technical sense:

A tool is a capability an agent can invoke to retrieve information or perform an action in a system.

That matches how Notion describes MCP connections: a connection exposes available tools to an agent, and those tools are things like search, fetch, list, view, create, update, delete, send, or post.

They also distinguish between read tools and write tools.

So at the MCP level, we could model it roughly as:

Agent → Connection → Tools → Actions/results

For example:

GitHub MCP connection

Tool: search repositories

Tool: read issue

Tool: create issue

Slack connection

Tool: search messages

Tool: post message

Tool: reply to thread

The terminology problem

This means Notion is effectively using Tool at two abstraction levels:

Product level

GitHub = Tool

Technical/agent level

create_issue = Tool

That is not necessarily a problem, because the audience and context make the meaning clear. But for Seed, we may want a more explicit conceptual model.

One possibility:

Tool → Connection → Capabilities / Actions

Where:

Tool: An application or service that can be used by a person or an agent to perform work.

Connection: The configured relationship between Seed and that tool, including authentication and permissions.

Capability / Action: A specific operation exposed by the tool, such as searching, reading, creating, updating, or sending.

Then an agent could use those capabilities:

Agent → Tool → Connection → Capabilities → Results

For example:

GitHub
→ connected as Gabo
→ search repositories
→ read issue
→ create issue

I think this gives us the simplicity of Notion's user-facing vocabulary without conflating GitHub the tool with create_issue the callable operation.