Question

You are building a multi-step agent that answers customer questions about their orders. The workflow requires the agent to (1) look up a customer's order ID from their email, (2) retrieve the shipment status using that order ID, and (3) generate a natural-language summary. During testing, the agent frequently fails at step 2 because it invokes the shipment-status tool with the customer's email instead of the order ID returned by step 1. What is the most effective way to fix this behavior?

Accepted Answer

Ensure each tool returns clearly structured output (e.g., a JSON field named order_id) and write tool descriptions that explicitly state which input each tool requires, so the agent can carry the intermediate result forward

Answer

Increase the agent's max_iterations so it has more attempts to eventually call the shipment-status tool with the correct argument

Answer

Combine all three steps into a single tool so the agent never has to pass intermediate results between calls

Answer

Switch the underlying foundation model to a larger pay-per-token model with a bigger context window