#tool-use
Every post tagged "tool-use".
76 posts · showing 41–50
-
The Loop Decisions You Only Make Once
Most agent design choices are cheap to revise. Six aren't — and in every case the answer that ages well is the same one, for the same reason.
-
What a Harness Actually Is, and Why It's the Real Product
A model takes messages and returns tool calls. Everything else is the harness — and it explains almost all the variance between agent systems that share the same model.
-
Raw SQL or Curated Queries? Giving an Agent Your Database
A two-line tool description can hand an agent unbounded access to your data and your query planner. The guardrails matter more than the choice — and one cheap planner call prevents most of the damage.
-
The Tool That Changed Under You: Supply-Chain Risk in Agent Tooling
No deploy, no prompt edit, and an ops agent started restarting services mid-investigation. A maintainer had improved a tool's documentation — and documentation, in an agent, is instruction.
-
One Query Is Rarely Enough: Iterative Retrieval for Agents
The search wasn't broken — it answered the question as typed, which isn't the question that was asked. Making retrieval a tool the agent calls repeatedly needs one signal most retrievers refuse to give.
-
Computer Use: When the Agent Drives a Whole Desktop
Clicking is easy; knowing what to click is a perception problem solved from a screenshot. The failures are modals, focus loss, and scroll state — and an agent that assumes its click landed compounds errors silently.
-
Retry Semantics: Which Tools Are Safe to Call Twice
Agents repeat tool calls for at least five ordinary reasons — none of them bugs. Whether that's harmless or a duplicate charge is a property of the tool, and usually one nobody wrote down.
-
Progressive Disclosure: Give the Agent Tools As It Needs Them
The tool list is a per-call parameter, not a fixed property. Withhold the write tools until acting is authorized and a compromised context has nothing dangerous to reach for — enforcement, not instruction.
-
Your First Agent: Build the Smallest Useful One
Three read-only tools, sixty lines of loop, and the raw array printed every turn. Then break it on purpose — a failing tool teaches more in five minutes than a week of building the complicated version.
-
Shared Tool Access: When Two Agents Touch the Same Resource
An agent holds a stale read for seconds, not microseconds — long enough that last-write-wins silently deletes another agent's work while both report success. Partition, append, or version.