More tools make agents worse: case for exposing only a minimal tool subset at runtime
apyhubnico · reddit · 2026-09-15
A developer pushes back on the assumption that giving AI agents more tools makes them more capable. Every extra tool adds a decision point, leading to wrong tool choices, tools competing with each other, more tokens spent on descriptions and selection, larger context windows, more unexpected calls, and a bigger security and cost blast radius.
- Better question: how few tools can you expose while still completing the task?
- Approach: keep the full tool catalog, but expose only a small task-relevant subset at runtime
- Example: an agent with 1,000+ capabilities might need just OCR → extraction → validation → conversion for a document task, without reasoning over the other 996
- A small architectural change that matters as agents move from demos to production
A practical take on agent tool orchestration and context engineering.
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