Building Advanced Tools for LLM Agents
Chapter 1: Foundations of LLM Agent Tooling
The Role of Tools in LLM Agent Capabilities
Understanding Tool Specifications and Descriptions
Designing Tool Interfaces for LLM Interaction
Best Practices for Tool Input and Output Schemas
Error Handling Strategies in Tool Execution
Security Principles for LLM Agent Tools
Hands-on: Crafting Your First Tool Definition
Quiz for Chapter 1
Chapter 2: Developing Custom Python Tools
Implementing Tools as Python Functions and Classes
Managing State and Context in Stateful Tools
Interacting with External Services: APIs and Databases
Validating and Sanitizing Tool Inputs
Structuring Complex Tool Outputs for LLMs
Asynchronous Tool Operations for Non-Blocking Tasks
Practice: Building a Database Query Tool
Quiz for Chapter 2
Chapter 3: Tool Selection and Orchestration
Agent-Driven Tool Selection Mechanisms
Designing Multi-Step Tool Execution Flows
Managing Dependencies Between Tool Calls
Conditional Tool Execution Logic
Recovering from Failures in Tool Chains
Implementing Sequential and Parallel Tool Use
Hands-on: Orchestrating a Multi-Tool Agent
Quiz for Chapter 3
Chapter 4: Integrating External APIs as Tools
Authenticating and Authorizing API Access for Tools
Parsing and Transforming API Responses
Handling API Rate Limits and Retries
Techniques for Mapping Natural Language to API Calls
Summarizing and Presenting API Data to LLMs
Security Aspects of API Tool Integration
Practice: Wrapping a Public API as an LLM Tool
Quiz for Chapter 4
Chapter 5: Advanced Tool Functionality
Tools for Code Interpretation and Execution
Developing Web Browsing and Content Extraction Tools
Creating Tools for File System Operations
Tools that Interact with User Interfaces
Considerations for Tools Requiring Human-in-the-Loop
Building Tools that Generate Structured Data
Hands-on: A Simple File Manipulation Tool
Quiz for Chapter 5
Chapter 6: Testing, Monitoring, and Maintaining Tools
Unit and Integration Testing for Agent Tools
Monitoring Tool Performance and Reliability
Logging Tool Invocations and LLM Interactions
Strategies for Versioning and Updating Tools
Evaluating Tool Effectiveness and LLM's Tool Usage
Debugging Common Issues in Tool-Augmented Agents
Practice: Setting Up Basic Logging for Tool Usage
Quiz for Chapter 6
Handling API Rate Limits and Retries
New · Open Source
Kerb - LLM Development Toolkit
Python toolkit for building production-ready LLM applications. Modular utilities for prompts, RAG, agents, structured outputs, and multi-provider support.
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- Error Retries and Exponential Backoff in AWS, Amazon Web Services, 2024 (Amazon Web Services) - A practical guide from a major cloud provider detailing best practices for implementing retry logic, including exponential backoff and jitter, to build resilient API clients.
- Tenacity: Retry decorator for Python, The Tenacity Developers, 2024 - Documentation for a popular Python library that simplifies adding retry functionality, with configurable backoff strategies and jitter, to function calls.
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems, Martin Kleppmann, 2017 (O'Reilly Media) - This book provides comprehensive principles for building robust and fault-tolerant distributed systems, which underpins the need for resilient API interaction strategies.
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