Frontier Engineering
Tool Use & Function Calling

Tool Error Handling

Tool error handling defines how an agent runtime manages failures during tool execution — including network errors, invalid arguments, timeouts, and permission denials. A robust strategy returns a structured error message to the model so it can decide whether to retry with different arguments, switch to an alternative tool, or surface the failure to a human operator. Silently swallowing errors typically leads to silent failures and incorrect agent outputs.