Tool Calling in Production: The Loop, the Pitfalls, and What Actually Works
· 9 min read
The first time your agent silently retries the same broken tool call three times before giving up, you realize that "just add tools" is not a production strategy. Tool calling unlocks genuine capabilities — external data, side effects, guaranteed-shape outputs — but the agentic loop that makes it work has sharp edges that don't show up in demos.
This post is about those edges: how the loop actually runs, the formatting rules that quietly destroy parallel execution, how to write tool descriptions that make the model choose correctly, and how to handle errors in a way that lets the model recover instead of spiral.
