The Bitter Lesson of Tool Calling

Tool use transforms LLMs into agents that act beyond their training data, and for code-capable models, programmatic tool calling extends this further by replacing rigid JSON calls with scripts that chain and parallelize naturally.

Tool use transforms LLMs into agents that act beyond their training data, and for code-capable models, programmatic tool calling extends this further by replacing rigid JSON calls with scripts that chain and parallelize naturally. However, a systematic evaluation of tools as…