Building Reliable AI Agents: Blurring the Line Between Tools and Agents

Unlocking the power of AI agents: From self-driving cars to building reliable systems, I'm Robert, Co-Founder and CTO at Wordware, sharing insights on how to overcome common challenges in developing automated tools that can take action in the real world.

1. Robert is the co-founder and CTO of Wordware, and has helped hundreds of teams build reliable AI agents.
2. The promise of agents is automated systems that can take action in the real world on your behalf.
3. Most agents are slow, expensive, and unreliable.
4. Many agents are low-level wrappers around APIs designed for deterministic state machines, not language models.
5. Agents struggle with long chains of requests, polluted context windows, and authentication.
6. Every tool added to an agent adds noise to the context window.
7. The solution is to add more agency to tools, blurring the line between what's a tool and what's an agent.
8. Wordware has created a new MCP toolbox that allows for building agentic MCPs.
9. With this toolbox, you can turn your Wordwares into tools for your agents.
10. The toolbox allows for adding multiple tools, grouped together or disparate, and switching them on and off for different tasks.
11. Robert demonstrates building a competitor analysis using the new MCP toolbox.
12. The competitor analysis requires taste, reasoning, and integration into both Twitter and Notion.
13. The Twitter scrape tool is used instead of finding a Twitter MCP.
14. The analysis creates an output that is written to Notion and returns the URL in the output.
15. With this toolbox, you can build highly reliable, highly repeatable, and highly aligned tools.
16. This allows for generic agents to be very specific and powerful for doing a task.
17. The agent can offload tasks to something more powerful, just as teams do with specialists in companies or the Avengers.
18. Web toolbox can be used to build these flows.
19. Anything can be used to build agentic MCPs.
20. Wordware's new MCP toolbox blurs the line between what's an agent and what's a tool.
21. The toolbox is still in early days, but it will be rolled out beyond beta soon.
22. Robert connects the competitor analysis to Claude, using it inside his agent.
23. Multiple tools can be added into the toolbox for different tasks.
24. Wordware allows for creating highly reliable and aligned tools that allow generic agents to be very specific and powerful.

Source: AI Engineer via YouTube

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