Error Handling and Safe Tool Execution
Make agent tools resilient and safe by handling failures gracefully, validating inputs, and constraining what tools are allowed to do during autonomous execution.
Tools Will Fail
Agents call external tools: APIs, databases, shells. These time out, return errors, or behave unexpectedly. An agent that crashes on the first failure is useless in production.
This lesson covers making tool execution safe and resilient.
Returning Errors as Observations
Instead of throwing, a tool should return the error as a message the agent can read. This lets the agent reason about the failure and try another approach.
def search(q):
try:
return api.search(q)
except Exception as e:
return 'ERROR: search failed: ' + str(e)All lessons in this course
- Defining & Using Tools
- Agent Types and Decision Making
- Leveraging Pre-built Toolkits
- Error Handling and Safe Tool Execution