World's Fair 2025
Just do it. (let your tools think for themselves) - Robert Chandler
Overview
This talk addresses the common challenges of unreliability, slowness, and cost associated with current AI agents that interact with external tools. The core thesis is that instead of creating simple, low-level wrappers around APIs, tools should be imbued with more agency, becoming specialized agents themselves. This approach blurs the line between tools and agents, enabling agents to offload complex tasks to more capable, specialized entities for improved performance and reliability.
Who should watch
- AI engineers building agentic systems
- Product managers seeking to improve agent reliability
- Developers looking to integrate AI agents with existing tools
- Builders struggling with complex tool interactions and context pollution
Key takeaways
- Many current AI agent tools are low-level API wrappers not designed for language models, leading to messy outputs and context pollution.
- Tools with narrow scopes, like single function wrappers, are difficult for LLMs to reason over, especially in multi-tool or paginated scenarios.
- Giving tools more agency, akin to specialized team members (like the Avengers analogy), allows them to handle complex tasks more effectively.
- The Wordware MCP toolbox enables the creation of agentic MCPs, turning existing workflows into tools for agents.
- These agentic tools can be described with natural language, providing reliable, reusable, and high-quality outputs.
- By grouping related tools into a toolbox, agents can switch between different sets of capabilities for various tasks.
- This approach blurs the line between agent and tool, allowing generic agents to perform specific, powerful tasks by offloading to specialized agentic tools.
- The competitor analysis example demonstrated how an agentic tool could integrate with Twitter and Notion for a complex, taste-driven task.
Notable quotes
*The promise of agents are automated systems that can take action in the real world on your behalf.*
*Unfortunately, most of the time they don't really work. They're often slow, expensive, and unreliable.*
*Well, in my opinion, we add more agency to the tools.*
Unofficial community note. Prefer the recording for nuance.