Writing Effective Tools for AI Agents — Using Agents
BlogAnthropic EngineeringJun 14, 2025
AI Summary
How to design the tool surface that an agent calls. Treat tool descriptions like onboarding docs for a new hire: name parameters unambiguously (user_id, not user), spell out edge cases, return structured errors. Demonstrates the meta-pattern of using Claude itself to optimize tool definitions, with measured improvements on internal benchmarks. The post that made tool-schema design a first-class concern instead of an API afterthought.
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