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tool use

Posts tagged tool use.

Why Agents Loop on Failed Tools: No-Progress Detection Beats Longer Prompts AI Agents

Why Agents Loop on Failed Tools: No-Progress Detection Beats Longer Prompts

Agents loop on failed tools because the harness never detects no-progress. Fingerprint calls, honor retryable:false, cap turns, and terminate with a reason code.

11 MIN
Agentic Systems: An Operating Manual for Multi-Agent Work That Ships AI Agents

Agentic Systems: An Operating Manual for Multi-Agent Work That Ships

An agentic system is not a chat window with tools. It is evaluators, sandboxes, state machines, memory contracts, and kill switches — built so the work survives contact with real data.

18 MIN
MCP vs Native Function Calling: Portability Tax vs Shortest Loop AI Agents

MCP vs Native Function Calling: Portability Tax vs Shortest Loop

Native function calling wins for one app's short tool loop; MCP earns the tax when tools must be shared and governed across hosts—not a LangChain swap.

11 MIN
Prompt Injection for Tool Agents: Stop Text from Becoming Actions AI Agents

Prompt Injection for Tool Agents: Stop Text from Becoming Actions

Defend production agents that read email, tickets, or pages by fencing untrusted text as data and blocking injection paths into tool calls.

12 MIN
Idempotent Agent Tool Writes: Retries Without Double Emails or Double Charges AI Agents

Idempotent Agent Tool Writes: Retries Without Double Emails or Double Charges

Make agent tool writes safe on timeout by minting runtime idempotency keys once, then sharing them across model, harness, and HTTP retries.

11 MIN
Tool Schemas Agents Follow: Descriptions, Enums, and Killing the Omnibus Tool AI Agents

Tool Schemas Agents Follow: Descriptions, Enums, and Killing the Omnibus Tool

Agents invent arguments when schemas are vague. Write JSON Schema like agent UX—enums, required fields, property descriptions—and kill the do_anything tool.

11 MIN
Pre-Execution Policy Gates: The Kill Switch That Lives Outside the Prompt AI Agents

Pre-Execution Policy Gates: The Kill Switch That Lives Outside the Prompt

Your agent’s kill switch is a pre-execution policy gate outside the prompt: allow, deny, or pending-approval before side effects — fail closed on outages.

11 MIN