Practical Agent Design: Tools Beat Personality

An agent is not a personality wrapper. It is a control loop over tools with a budget for steps and mistakes.

Give agents the smallest tool set that can finish the job. Overgrown tool catalogs become roulette wheels for bad plans.

Prefer structured tool outputs (JSON, typed fields) over free-form text pipes. Structure is how you recover from partial success.

Hard-cap iterations. Users tolerate a slow answer less than a quiet infinite loop against their account or files.

Personality can be thin. Reliability is the feature.