#tool-use
Every post tagged "tool-use".
76 posts · showing 31–40
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Let the Model Pick the Transition, Not the Tool
A returns agent that can issue a refund before it has checked eligibility will eventually do exactly that, and no amount of prompt wording reliably stops it. Making the call unavailable is a design decision, not a prompt one.
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Extraction Was Never the Hard Part: An Invoice Agent, Rebuilt
The first version had the model read invoices and type the numbers. The rebuild started after the numbers were already read — which is where the actual work in accounts payable has always been.
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Four Tool Calls to One Answer: A Research Run, Annotated
A research agent answers one question in four steps. Reading what changed in the transcript between each step explains more about how agents work than any diagram of the loop.
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Should Your Agent Remember That, or Just Look It Up Again?
Two questions sort every fact an agent encounters into "write it down" or "fetch it fresh" — and getting the sort wrong is how an assistant ends up confidently quoting a meeting that moved last week.
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Handing an Agent a PDF: Three Paths Into the Context
A PDF never enters a context window — something derived from it does. The counterparty name right and the date wrong usually means the document took the wrong path in.
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Test the Tool or Test the Agent? What Each Layer Catches
Sort a month of eval failures by root cause and most turn out to be tool contract bugs — findable in milliseconds by a unit test, currently being caught by the slowest instrument you own.
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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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The Timeout That Looked Like an Empty Result
The health check timed out, the handler returned an empty list, and the agent reported all clear while two services were down. An empty result and a failed check must not share a shape.
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Agent Vocabulary: What the Terms Actually Mean
People discussing the same word are frequently discussing different things. Four of the distinctions are load-bearing — and when an agent conversation isn't converging, it's usually one of them.
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Prompt Engineering Was the Beginning, Not the Skill
It got named as a discipline when the prompt was the entire interface. It's now one input among several — and if better prompts have stopped helping, five specific things are usually why.