Building Tools

Design tools that agents can use effectively

🔑 Key Concepts

Tool design principles — One responsibility, clear input/output, idempotent when possible, descriptive names and docs.
Composite tools — Instead of 'get_user' + 'get_orders' + 'format_email', create 'send_order_summary_email'. Fewer steps, fewer errors.
Input validation — The model might pass wrong types. Validate in the tool function before executing.
Caching — Cache tool results for identical inputs. Saves time and money on repeated queries.

💡 Practice: Try implementing each concept yourself before moving on. Reading about RAG and building RAG are very different things.