{
  "id": 18327478,
  "title": "Fail Loudly: A Tool-Schema Decision Tree for Agent Steps That Return Wrong Answers Without Failing",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/11/05/fail-loudly-a-tool-schema-decision-tree-for-agent-steps-that-return",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-11-05T15:32:16.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/devpy_9520/fail-loudly-a-tool-schema-decision-tree-for-agent-steps-that-return-wrong-answers-without-failing-1g13"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "The bug report often follows a similar pattern: the agent executes successfully, no exception is raised, and the issue is filed against the incorrect customer. There is no stack trace because nothing has crashed. A field defaults to null, the tool accepts it, and the model produces a confident summary. Silent failures like this consume more debugging time than exceptions do, as exceptions provide a clear indication of where to look. This article presents a decision tree for this specific class of bugs, featuring six glossary terms, five branches, and a one-minute linter that you can apply to your own tool schemas.",
  "summary": "The bug report is always a variant of the same sentence: the agent ran, nothing threw, and the ticket got filed against the wrong customer. There is no stack trace because nothing crashed. A field defaulted to null , the tool accepted it, and the model wrote a confident summary on top. Silent failures like this burn more debugging hours than exceptions do, because an exception tells you where to…",
  "key_points": [
    "Agent executes successfully without raising exceptions",
    "Field defaults to null, causing silent failures",
    "One-minute linter to detect tool schema issues"
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}