How to pass paraemeters (e.g. max_results for TavilySearch) to built-in tools in JSON/JSONC agent files?

CrewAI Community Support
1

I’m building a crew with the JSON-first approach (crew.jsonc + agents/*.jsonc) on crewai 1.15.22 and want to configure a built-in tool per agent. I couldn’t find this in the docs.

Goal: give two agents different TavilySearchTool settings (scout max_results: 10, curator max_results: 5), all in JSON, without switching to the Python @CrewBase approach.

What I tried (in agents/scout.jsonc):

"tools": [
  {
    "name": "TavilySearchTool",
    "config": { "max_results": 10, "search_depth": "basic" }
  }
]

Result:

JSONProjectError: agents\scout.jsonc: validation failed: 1 validation error for Agent
tools.0.description
  Field required [type=missing, input_value={'name': 'TavilySearchToo...search_depth': 'basic'}}, input_type=dict]

Here is the full jsonc file for my agent:

{
  "role": "Research Assistant",
  "goal": "...",
  "backstory": "...",
  "llm": "gemini-3.8-flash",
  "tools": [
    // "TavilySearchTool"   -> Instead of this, I would like to pass parameters using a json first approach
    // to pass parameters like max_results
    {
      "tool_type": "crewai_tools.tools.tavily_search_tool.tavily_search_tool.TavilySearchTool",
      "max_results": 5,
      "search_depth": "basic"
    }
  ],

  "settings": {
    "verbose": true,
    "allow_delegation": false
  }

}

Is there a proper way to do this using the jsonc approach?