Technically speaking, you can get away with just a Bash tool, and I had some success with this. It's actually quite interesting to take away tools from agents and see how creative they are with the use.

One of the reasons why you get better performance if you give them the other tools is that there has been some reinforcement learning on Sonne with all these tools. The model is aware of how these tools work, it is more token-efficient and it is generally much more successful at performing those actions. The Bash tool, for instance, at times gets confused by bashisms, not escaping arguments correctly, not handling whitespace correctly etc.

▲ 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

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▲ normie3000 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The model is aware of how these tools work, it is more token-efficient and it is generally much more successful at performing those actions.

Interesting! This didn't seem to be the case in the OP's examples - for instance using a list_files tool and then checking if the json result included README vs bash [ -f README ]

	▲	the_mitsuhiko 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Interesting! This didn't seem to be the case in the OP's examples - for instance using a list_files tool and then checking if the json result included README vs bash [ -f README ] There is no training on a tool with that name. But it likely also doesn't need training because the parameter is just a path and that's a pretty basic tool. On the other hand to know how to execute a bash command, you need to know bash. Bash is a known tool to the Claude models [1] and so is text editing [2]. You're supposed to reference those in the tool listing but at least from my testing, the moment you call a tool "bash", Claude makes plenty of assumptions about what the point of this thing is. [1]: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/tool-use... [2]: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/tool-use...

▲ dotancohen 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

  > The Bash tool, for instance, at times gets confused by bashisms, not escaping arguments correctly, not handling whitespace correctly etc.

This was the only informative sentence in the reply. Can you please go on in this manner - it was an important question.