#tool-use
Every post tagged "tool-use".
76 posts · showing 51–60
-
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.
-
The File System as a Tool: Underrated Agent Infrastructure
Four hundred thousand rows won't fit in a context window; a path and a preview cost nothing. A scoped directory solves large results, durable state, and reviewable artifacts at once — if you resolve paths correctly.
-
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.
-
Give the Agent a Scratchpad: External Working Memory
Three small tools stop the context from being the only place findings can live. Compaction stops being lossy, long runs stop growing, and you get a readable record instead of a forty-turn transcript.
-
OAuth for Agents: Acting on Behalf of a User
A service account with everyone's access puts your entire access-control model inside a model's judgment. Per-user tokens move the check to where prompt injection can't reach it.
-
What a System Prompt Should and Shouldn't Contain
Five things belong in a system prompt. Most of what accumulates there — tool instructions, deterministic rules, incident patches, data — belongs somewhere it would actually work.
-
Sandboxing Code Execution: What a `run_code` Tool Actually Needs
One tool replaces dozens — and hands a model that reads untrusted text a general-purpose mechanism for doing anything the process can do. Four boundaries, four isolation levels, and the one people leave open.
-
Agents That Wait: Callbacks, Webhooks, and Long-Running Tools
A twenty-minute export breaks the assumption that tools return quickly. Handles, in-loop polling, and true suspension — plus the expiry field that stops suspended runs leaking forever.
-
Fan-Out, Fan-In: Parallelism Inside a Single Agent
Twelve independent checks shouldn't cost twelve turns, each re-sending the whole context. Three levels of parallelism inside one agent — and the fan-in is where the pattern usually goes wrong.
-
The Data-Cleaning Agent and the Column It Silently Dropped
It normalized the phone numbers, standardized the country codes, and quietly deleted 412 rows that looked untidy. Any task phrased as "make this better" reads as permission to remove what doesn't fit.