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Claude Advanced Tool Use

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude Advanced Tool Use

#211

Post by [deleted] »

JyB wrote: post #136
losvedir wrote: post #80

I never really understood why you have to stuff all the tools in the context. Is there something wrong with having all your tools in, say, a markdown file, and having a subagent read it with a description of the problem at hand and returning just the tool needed at that moment? Is that what this tool search is?

That’s exactly what it is in essence. The MCP protocol simply doesn’t have any mechanism specifications (yet) for not loading tools completely in the context. There’s nothing really strange about it. It’s just a protocol update issue.

[deleted]

Re: Claude Advanced Tool Use

#212

Post by _joel »

slhck wrote: post #182
esperent wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't had much luck with skills being called appropriately. When I have a skill called "X doer", and then I write a prompt like "Open and do X", it almost never loads up the skill. I have to rewrite the prompt as "Open and do X using the X doer skill". Which is basically exactly as much effort as what I was doing previously of having prewritten sub-prompts/agents in files and loading up the file each time I want…

Same experience here – it seems I have to specifically tell it to use the "X skill" to trigger it reliably. I guess with all the different rules set up for Claude to follow, it needs that particular word to draw its attention to the required skill.

Ditto, I also find it'll invariably decide to disregard the CLAUDE.md again and produce a load of crap I didn't really ask it for.

Re: Claude Advanced Tool Use

#213

Post by cjmcqueen »

mirekrusin wrote: post #109
jmward01 wrote: post #28

The Programmatic Tool Calling has been an obvious next step for a while. It is clear we are heading towards code as a language for LLMs so defining that language is very important. But I'm not convinced of tool search. Good context engineering leaves the tools you will need so adding a search if you are going to use all of them is just more overhead. What is needed is a more compact tool definition language like, I d…

Exactly, instead of this mess, you could just give it something like .d.ts. Easy to maintain, test etc. - like any other library/code. You want structure? Just export * as Foo from '@foo/foo' and let it read .d.ts for '@foo/foo' if it needs to. But wait, it's also good at writing code. Give it write access to it then. Now it can talk to sql server, grpc, graphql, rest, jsonrpc over websocket, or whatever ie. your usb…

Skynet is exactly where I thought this was heading...

Re: Claude Advanced Tool Use

#214

Post by mlrtime »

theknarf wrote: post #202

We should just build more CLI tools, that way the agentic AI can just run `yourtool --help` to learn how to use it. Instead of needing an MCP-server to access ex. Jira it should just call a cli tool `jira`. Better CLI tools for everything would help both AI and humans alike.

This is exactly what I do when given an PAT + api documentation, write my own tool. Sure it'd be better if atlassian did it, but I'm not holding my breath.

Re: Claude Advanced Tool Use

#215

Post by olliem36 »

Sounds good for tasks like the excel example in the article, but I wonder how this approach will hold up in other multi-step agentic flows. Let me explain:

I try to be defensive in agent architectures to make it easy for AI models to recover/fix workflows if something unexpected happens.

If something goes wrong halfway through the code execution of multiple 'tools' using Programmatic Tool Calling, it's significantly more complex for the AI model to fix that code and try again compared to a single tool usage - you're in trouble, especially if APIs/tools are not idempotent.

The sweet spot might be using this as a strategy to complete tasks that are idempotent/retryable (like a database 'transaction') if they fail half way through execution.

Re: Claude Advanced Tool Use

#216

Post by rglullis »

jawns wrote: post #77

I'm starting to notice a pattern with these AI assistants. Scenario: I realize that the recommended way to do something with the available tools is inefficient, so I implement it myself in a much more efficient way. Then, 2-3 months later, new tools come out to make all my work moot. I guess it's the price of living on the cutting edge.

Fire and Motion: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

Re: Claude Advanced Tool Use

#217

Post by mlrtime »

lukan wrote: post #181
jawns wrote: post #77

I'm starting to notice a pattern with these AI assistants. Scenario: I realize that the recommended way to do something with the available tools is inefficient, so I implement it myself in a much more efficient way. Then, 2-3 months later, new tools come out to make all my work moot. I guess it's the price of living on the cutting edge.

The frustrating part is, with all the hype it is hard to see, what are really the working ways right now. I refused to go your way to live on the edge and just occasionally used ChatGPT for specific tasks, but I do like the idea to get AI assistants for the old codebases and gave the modern ways a shot just now again, but it still seems messy and I never know if I am simply not doing it right, or if there simply is n…

This is the cost of bleeding edge... in our internal company ai slack channel people ask what is the best method to do something every week.

The answer is always something like: "As of today, do a,b,c. But this will be different next week/month".

I like it, we are at the forefront of this technology and years from now we will be telling stories to kids on how it used to be.

Re: Claude Advanced Tool Use

#218

Post by taytus »

notpublic wrote: post #199
jimbo808 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude is pretty good at totally disregarding most of what’s in your CLAUDE.md, so I’m not optimistic. For example a project I work on gives it specific scripts to run when it runs automated tests, because the project is set up in a way that requires some special things to happen before tests will work correctly. I’ve never once seen it actually call those scripts on the first try. It always tries to run them using t…

Instead of including all these instructions in CLAUDE.md, have you considered using custom Skills? I’ve implemented something similar, and Skills works really well. The only downside is that it may consume more tokens.

Yes, sometimes skills are more reliable, but not always. That is the biggest culprit to me so far. The fact that you cannot reliably trust these LLMs to follow steps or instructions makes them unsuitable for my applications.

Re: Claude Advanced Tool Use

#219

Post by Libidinalecon »

Culonavirus wrote: post #175
ra wrote: post #100

This is heading in the wrong direction. > The future of AI agents is one where models work seamlessly across hundreds or thousands of tools. Says who? I see it going the other way - less tools, better skills to apply those tools. To take it to an extreme, you could get by with ShellTool.

> less tools, better skills to apply those tools All models have peaked (the velocity of progress is basically zero compared to previous years) -there are not going to be "better skills" (any time soon). All these bubbled up corps(es) have to try to sell what they can, agent this, tool that, buzzword soup to keep the investors clueless one more year.

I just know how you can spend anytime with Gemini 3 and say things have peaked and progress is zero.

Just totally absurd.

It is really the opposite, the models are getting so good I question why I am wasting my time reading stupid comments like this from people.

Re: Claude Advanced Tool Use

#220

Post by nautilus12 »

jimbo808 wrote: post #154
losvedir wrote: post #80

I never really understood why you have to stuff all the tools in the context. Is there something wrong with having all your tools in, say, a markdown file, and having a subagent read it with a description of the problem at hand and returning just the tool needed at that moment? Is that what this tool search is?

Claude is pretty good at totally disregarding most of what’s in your CLAUDE.md, so I’m not optimistic. For example a project I work on gives it specific scripts to run when it runs automated tests, because the project is set up in a way that requires some special things to happen before tests will work correctly. I’ve never once seen it actually call those scripts on the first try. It always tries to run them using t…

I had the same problem. My Claude md eventually gets forgotten and it forgets best practices that I put in there. I've switched to using hooks that run it through a variety of things like requiring testing. That seems to work better than Claude md because it has to run the hook every time it makes changes.
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