The first time I gave an AI agent access to APIs, I thought the difficult part would be getting the tool calling to work...

The first time I gave an AI agent access to APIs, I thought the difficult part would be getting the tool calling to work.It wasn't.Getting the model to understand that it could call get_customer(), get_order(), or send_email() was surprisingly straightforward. Once the tools were described properly, the model could select one, generate arguments, wait for the result, and continue the conversation.For a prototype, it felt almost magical.Then I started thinking about what would happen if I gave the same agent access to something more serious.What if one of those APIs could issue a refund?What if another could cancel a subscription?What if the agent could send an email to a customer?What if it could modify a database?The problem suddenly changed.I was no longer asking:“Can my AI agent call this API?”I was asking:“Should my AI agent be allowed to call this API right now?”That turned out to be a much more interesting engineering problem.An AI model can decide what tool appears relevant. Tha...