#tool-use
Every post tagged "tool-use".
76 posts · showing 61–70
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MCP: What a Standard Tool Protocol Changes, and What It Doesn't
Portable integrations and runtime discovery are real wins. Tool design, selection accuracy, permissions, and untrusted content are exactly as hard as before — and easy connection quietly makes two of them worse.
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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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Indirect Prompt Injection: When the Tool Result Is the Attack
The attack doesn't come from your user — it comes from the page, ticket, or document your agent fetched. Three conditions have to hold for it to work, and breaking any one is an architectural choice, not a prompt.
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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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Designing for Resumability: Agents That Survive a Restart
Serializing the message array is the obvious approach and it produces subtly wrong resumptions. What has to survive a crash is a work ledger, idempotent side effects, and enough state to rebuild context from scratch.
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What Breaks First When You Give an Agent a Browser
Six failures, in the order they arrive: the page isn't what you think it is, selectors rot, state assumptions break silently, and the session carries more authority than the task needs.
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One Prompt Per Job Beats One Prompt For All: The Router Pattern
Every new case adds a paragraph, and adherence to all of them drops. Classify first and run a small prompt built for that class — with per-route tools, limits, and approval policy.
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Reading Your First Agent Trace: Wrong Tool, Wrong Argument, or Wrong Plan?
Four buckets, checked in order, and most agent failures resolve before you get to the interesting one. The trick is finding the first wrong turn and reading the raw array — not the pretty rendering.
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The Research Agent That Cited the Wrong Page
Every source was real and had been read. Two citations still pointed at the wrong page — one at a source that disagreed. Attribution is a lookup, and generation isn't a lookup.
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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.