Tools

An agent can do more than talk. Mid-call it can look up a balance, an order status, an appointment slot — anything the business it belongs to can answer.

None of that work happens on this host. The agent server has no database and no idea what any of those tools mean. It carries the request out to the agent client and carries the answer back.

model asks for "check_balance"
        │
        ▼
  agent server ──▶ agent client ──▶ the business's own system
        ◀──────────── answer ◀───────────────┘
        │
        ▼
model continues the conversation

What this means operationally

Tools are configured on the agent, not here. There is nothing to install, declare or permit on this host to make a tool available.

A slow tool is heard as silence. While the client is answering, the model is not speaking, and the caller hears that. The wait is bounded and always ends in an answer to the model — if the client does not answer in time, the model is told the lookup failed so it can apologise and carry on. A caller hearing “I couldn’t pull that up just now” is a far better outcome than a line that goes quiet.

So a tool that is slow on the client side shows up as pauses in conversations, not as errors in this log.

Two tools belong to the server. end_call — how a model hangs up, subject to a contract that checks it is entitled to — and a no-op tool declared beside it. The second exists so that a model which feels the urge to “use a tool” at a moment that is not an ending has somewhere harmless to put it, rather than reaching for end_call and cutting a live human off.

It is answered instantly, inside the server, precisely because sending it out and back would spend a multi-second silence avoiding a mistake that costs nothing.

In the logs

Tool activity appears against the call’s bridge id. A call that pauses oddly, with the agent going quiet and then apologising, is usually a tool the client was slow to answer — the place to look is the client’s logs, not this one.