#tool-use
Every post tagged "tool-use".
76 posts · showing 21–30
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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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Draining a Data Backlog: Should the Agent Batch Rows or Take Them One at a Time?
The ratio of preamble tokens to row tokens decides whether chunking a backlog saves an order of magnitude or nothing at all — and it's the alignment, retry amplification and blast radius that decide whether you should anyway.
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Do You Need an Agent Framework? Write the 40-Line Loop First
The agent loop is shorter than the quickstart for the framework that hides it. Write it once — then you can tell which framework features you actually need and which ones you'd be adopting on faith.
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Green Evals, Broken Production: The Frozen Fixture Problem
An eval suite built on recorded tool responses stops testing your agent and starts testing a museum. Here are three cheap detectors for fixture rot — and the rule for when a case should call the live tool instead.
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Who Decides the Agent Is Done? Three Stop Conditions, and Why "The Model Said So" Isn't One
Most first agents end their loop when the model stops calling tools — which means the model, not you, decides what "done" means. Here are the three stop conditions a real loop needs, and the twenty lines that turn a silent wrong answer into another iteration.
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Read, Draft, Send: Where to Draw the Permission Line in a Personal Email Agent
Most email agents get permissions wrong by granting them per tool. The safer line runs through the arguments — who the recipient is, how many there are, and whether the thread was already open.
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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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Retry, Reroute, or Hand Back: Budgeting an Agent's Second Chances
A tool call fails and the loop tries again — five times, forty seconds, and still nothing usable for the user. Retrying is only one of three legal responses, and picking the wrong one turns a fast failure into an expensive one.
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When Memory Contradicts the Tool Call, Which One Does the Agent Believe?
An agent had the live billing data and a three-week-old memory in the same context window, and answered from the memory. The reason isn't retrieval — it's how prompts are assembled, and there are three specific fixes.
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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.