Giving AI Agents More Tools Makes Them Dumber, Not Better
raw-hit10 · reddit · 2026-08-12
The author shares a core observation from building AI agents: blindly adding tools degrades model performance rather than enhancing it.
- Decision fatigue & errors: With a long tool list (e.g., 20 items), models struggle to choose correctly, often burning turns or picking the wrong tool.
- Less is more: After trimming a bloated agent from 15 tools down to 5 and merging overlapping functions (like duplicate email actions or CRM operations), wrong-tool calls virtually stopped, and operational costs dropped.
- Strict admission criteria: The author enforces a hard rule—if you can't explain in one sentence why a tool exists and when to use it, it doesn't get added. Two tools doing almost the same thing is a bug, not flexibility.
The author concludes that while general assistants might need breadth, most agents sold today are really just single workflows, which perform best when kept narrow and focused.
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