Examining Tool Use / Function Calling

[TomLucidor]

Recently reading around OpenHands and other tools, it seems that tool use support across multiple models are very fragile. Why is that?

[rmusser01]

Have to have a defined method for calling the tool, which usually ends up being JSON, and if any part of the JSON is incorrect, then that leads to issues.

[TomLucidor]

I think they said that LLMs have a hard time generating JSON due to escape characters, not sure if there are alternatives or mitigation strategies

[rmusser01]

Structured outputs

[TomLucidor]

I meant like which other formats are an alternative to JSON as structured output without certain character encoding constraints