Building Production-Grade Tools for AI Agents: What Works After 100 Deployments

Most developers who build AI agents make the same mistake: they spend weeks designing the orchestration layer, tuning the system prompt, and picking the right model — then hand the LLM a pile of hastily wrapped API endpoints and wonder why it fails in production. Here's the hard truth from teams shipping agents daily: tool design has a larger impact on agent reliability than prompt engineering. A well-crafted tool prevents hallucinations at the structural level. A poorly crafted tool guarantees