tool-use-guardian

Tool Use Guardian

Overview

The reliability wrapper every AI agent needs. Monitors tool calls, auto-retries failures, fixes truncated responses, and learns which tools are unreliable — so you never lose your chain of thought.

Free forever. Built by the Genesis Agent Marketplace.

Install

npx skills add christopherlhammer11-ai/tool-use-guardian

When to Use This Skill

• Use when tool calls return truncated or malformed JSON
• Use when APIs timeout or rate-limit your agent mid-task
• Use when a multi-step chain breaks partway through
• Use when you need automatic retry logic without writing it yourself
• Use for any agent workflow that depends on external tool reliability

How It Works

Step 1: Pre-Call Validation

Before every tool call, Guardian validates:

• Required parameters are present and correctly typed
• The tool is not marked as "unreliable" from previous failures
• Request size is within known limits

Step 2: Failure Classification

When a tool call fails, Guardian classifies the failure into one of 9 categories:

Failure Type	Recovery Action
Truncated JSON	Re-fetch with pagination or smaller chunks
API Timeout	Retry once with simpler request, then decompose
Rate Limit (429)	Exponential backoff, max 3 retries
Auth Expired	Flag for user intervention
Mid-chain Break	Resume from last successful checkpoint
Error-as-200	Detect {"error": "..."} disguised as success
Schema Mismatch	Attempt auto-coercion, warn if lossy
Network Failure	Retry with jitter, max 2 attempts
Unknown Error	Log full context, escalate to user

Step 3: Chain Protection

For multi-step tool chains, Guardian maintains checkpoints. If step 4 of 7 fails, it resumes from step 4 — never restarts from scratch.

Step 4: Learning

Guardian tracks failure patterns per tool. After 3+ failures of the same type, it marks the tool as unreliable and suggests alternatives.

Best Practices

• ✅ Let Guardian wrap all external tool calls automatically
• ✅ Review Guardian's reliability reports to identify flaky tools
• ✅ Use checkpoint recovery for long chains
• ❌ Don't disable retry logic for rate-limited APIs
• ❌ Don't ignore repeated failure warnings

Related Skills

• @recallmax - Long-context memory enhancement (also free from Genesis Marketplace)

Links

• Repo: https://github.com/christopherlhammer11-ai/tool-use-guardian
• Marketplace: https://genesis-node-api.vercel.app
• Browse skills: https://genesis-marketplace.vercel.app

Limitations

• Use this skill only when the task clearly matches the scope described above.
• Do not treat the output as a substitute for environment-specific validation, testing, or expert review.
• Stop and ask for clarification if required inputs, permissions, safety boundaries, or success criteria are missing.