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AI Letters #06 - Give Your Agent Hands: Tools, APIs, and the Model Context Protocol

· 3 min read
EngineersOfAI
AI Engineering Education

A team demo'd an agent that "connected to the database." The model described what it would do with the data - in detail, confidently. The database call was never wired up.

Tool descriptions are not documentation. They are the interface between language and execution. Get them wrong and the agent calls the wrong tool, at the wrong time, with the wrong arguments.

Part 2 of 5: tool design rules, a production tool registry, safe execution patterns, and the Model Context Protocol - the standard that is quietly becoming the default way agents talk to the world.

This letter was first published on AI Letters →

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