Stop using web search for every little thing in AI agents

#opensource #webdev #typescript #ai

I’ve been building a few AI agents lately, and I noticed something that really started to bug me.

Whenever I ask an agent a simple question like "What’s the price of Bitcoin?" or "Is it raining in London?". It almost always defaults to a web search tool. If you've watched this happen, you know it's a mess.

The agent spends 5 seconds "browsing," scrapes a bunch of junk from a website, and then burns through thousands of tokens just to find one single number. It’s like using a bulldozer to pick up a coin. It’s slow, it’s expensive, and it feels like a waste of time.

I wanted something faster and cleaner. So I built @neuledge/graph.

The "Lookup" tool: A faster way to get facts

The core of this is a tool called lookup. Instead of having the AI surf the messy web, it just asks for a specific "path" to a fact.

It looks like this:

Weather: cities.tokyo.weather
Stocks: stocks.aapl.quote
Money: currencies.usd.rate.eur

Because the data is pre-fetched and structured, the response comes back in under 100ms. There’s no "Searching..." spinner. To the user, the AI just seems smart and fast.

It handles AI "typos" (Self-healing)

One thing I learned is that LLMs aren't great at following strict rules. They might try to guess a path and say get_the_weather_of_london.

Instead of just returning an error, I built the tool to suggest the right path. It tells the AI: "I don't have that, but I have cities.london.weather. Use that instead." The agent sees that, fixes itself, and gets the data on the next try. It makes the whole agent feel way more robust.

Why I built it this way

I mainly built this to save myself from the headache of managing 10 different API keys for every new project.

If you use this, you don't need a separate account for a weather service, a finance API, and a currency converter. You just install the package and give the tool to your agent. It works with basically any framework (Vercel AI SDK, LangChain, etc.).

What's in it right now?