Architecture & Patterns: Tool Calling + Structured Outputs

Production Patterns

Architecture View

graph LR
  A[User request] --> B[Tool selection]
  B --> C[Schema validation]
  C --> D[Tool execution]
  D --> E[Structured response]

Common Failure Modes

Common Failure Modes

• Executing tools before validating arguments.
• Unbounded repair loops that never terminate.
• Blending human-readable and machine-readable outputs unsafely.

Interview Q&A

Q: Interview Q: What belongs in a tool response envelope?

Include tool name, normalized inputs, result payload, status, and error metadata. This keeps tracing and retries deterministic.

Q: Interview Q: When should you stop repair attempts?

Stop after a small fixed retry count or when error type repeats. Return safe fallback to avoid infinite correction loops.