Comment by padolsey

It’s hard to communicate about this stuff. I think people hear ‘tools’ and ‘function calling’ and assume it provides an actual suite of tools or pre-made routines that it calls upon on the Anthropic backend. But nope. It’s just a way of generating a structured schema from a prompt. It’s really crucial work, but just funny how obscured the boring truth is. Also FWIW I experience a tonne more schema adherence if I use XML-like semantic tags rather than JSON. XML is so much more forgiving a format too.