A tool description should answer five questions before an agent calls it

Reddit r/AI_Agents News

Summary

The author argues that a good tool description for AI agents should answer five key questions — when to use it, what each input means, what success looks like, all possible errors, and permission rules — since most tools only address one of the five, forcing the agent to guess the rest.

Been thinking about what makes a tool actually usable by an agent. Not the model. The description. A good tool description answers five questions. When to use it and when not to — without this the agent tries it everywhere. What each input means and which ones are mandatory — vague inputs are where silent failures start. What success looks like — an agent that can't recognize success can't check its own work. Every error it can throw, stated plainly — an undocumented error gets misread. And the permission rules — who can call it, what needs approval, what's off limits. Most tools answer one of the five. The agent guesses the rest. Which one do you see skipped most often?
Original Article

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