Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What you need to know Tool count grows by accretion, not design. Each integration adds ten to forty tools and nobody removes one. Three separate costs — tokens, selection accuracy and latency — and they do not respond to the same fix. Prompt caching addresses tokens only. The model still reads every definition, so accuracy is untouched. Retrieval controls breadth: embed descriptions and example invocations, retrieve top-k per task, pin a small must-have set. Deferred schemas control depth: names and one-line summaries first, full parameter shapes only when needed. Adding a tool is a migration. Re-run the selection eval before it ships, as you would for a schema change. How an agent quietly ends up with 200 tools The arithmetic is unremarkable and that is precisely why it catches teams…
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