Question

You are building a scheduling assistant with a tool called book_meeting. During testing, Claude frequently calls the tool with the date in an inconsistent format (sometimes 'next Tuesday', sometimes '2024-06-11'), causing the backend to reject requests. The tool's input schema already specifies a 'date' field as a string. What is the most effective change to reduce these malformed calls?

Accepted Answer

In the tool description, clearly specify the expected date format (e.g., ISO 8601 'YYYY-MM-DD') and note that relative dates must be resolved first.

Answer

Add stop sequences to the request so Claude halts before producing an incorrect date format.

Answer

Set tool_choice to force the book_meeting tool on every turn so Claude always uses it.

Answer

Lower the temperature to 0 so Claude produces the same date format each time.