tool-design
2 articles
How the Claude Code Team Designs Tools: Learning to See Like an Agent
Claude Code engineer Thariq shares a year of agent tool design lessons: three failed attempts at question-asking, Todo Lists becoming constraints, replacing RAG with Grep, and expanding capabilities without adding tools.
Stripping Down Three Excel AI Agents: Claude Has 14 Tools, Copilot Has 2, Shortcut Can Actually SEE the Spreadsheet — Five Questions Every Agent Builder Must Answer
Nicolas Bustamante reverse-engineered three production Excel AI agents (Claude in Excel, Microsoft Copilot, Shortcut AI), comparing their tool schemas, overwrite protection, verification loops, and memory systems. The model doesn't matter — tool architecture is everything. He then ran the same DCF valuation prompt on all three, audited every formula, and found wildly different quality levels that map directly to architectural choices.