#function-calling
Every post tagged "function-calling".
22 posts · showing 11–20
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Your Agent Has One manage_calendar Tool. That's Why It Deleted the Wrong Meeting.
A single do-everything tool looks tidy in the schema and hides four separate problems: guessed actions, unvalidated payloads, permissions that can't tell reading from deleting, and traces that flatten three risk levels into one name. Here's where to cut instead — and where splitting makes things worse.
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How Should a Team Review a Tool Description Diff? Treat It Like a Schema Migration
A six-word edit to a tool description is a behavior change with no compiler to catch it. Borrowing the review checklist teams already use for schema migrations turns an unreviewable prose diff into something you can actually approve.
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The Tool Returned 200 and Nothing Happened
A calendar agent reported success on a meeting that landed at 3am, on the wrong calendar, with no invitation sent. The API did exactly what it was asked — and the return value gave the agent no way to know.
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Three Ways to Get Valid JSON, and What Each One Costs
The retry loop was working and quietly biased: the tickets needing three attempts weren't a random sample, and their eventual valid output was thinner than the truth.
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Choosing Your First Three Tools
Find, read, finish. The third one is the one people leave out, and it's the one that turns "the agent stopped talking" into something you can actually check.
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Designing Tools for Agents vs Designing APIs for Developers
One endpoint, one tool is the obvious mapping and the wrong one. APIs assume a consumer who reads docs once and writes a loop — an agent re-decides everything from a paragraph, every call.
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Tool Calls or Structured Output? Two Mechanisms, Two Jobs
Both emit schema-conforming JSON, which makes them look interchangeable. One expects a result back and one ends the turn — and that single difference decides every other question.
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Format Tool Output for a Model, Not for a Log File
A bare empty array means "none exist" and "we couldn't check" at the same time, and the agent will pick the confident reading. Six changes to what your handlers return, in order of payoff.
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The Agent That Read Page 1 of 40: Pagination in Tool Design
It reported three overdue invoices. There were sixty-one. The tool worked as documented — which is exactly why this bug is so common and so quiet.
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One Search Tool or Five? Getting Tool Granularity Right
Five narrow search tools or one with filters? The choice doesn't remove errors, it relocates them — and one of the two places is much cheaper to defend.