alt Hacker NewsI guess I fail to see why this is such a problem. Yes it would be nice if the wire format were standardized or had a standard schema description, but is writing a parser that handles several formats actually a difficult problem? Modern models could probably whip up a "libToolCallParser" with bindings for all popular languages in an afternoon. Could probably also have an automated workflow for adding any new ones with minimal fuss. An annoyance, yes, but it does not seem like a really "hard" problem. It seems more of a social problem that open source hasn't coalesced around a library that handles it easily yet or am I missing something?
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Author here. You're right, it's not a hard problem, but a particularly annoying one.
Maybe they could vibe code some sort of, I don't know, a Web Service Description Language. That could describe how to interact with a service.
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There already exist products like LiteLLM that adapt tool calling to different providers. FWIW, incompatibility isn't just an opensource problem - OpenAI and Anthropic also use different syntax for tool registration and invocation.
I would guess that lack of standardization of what tools are provided by different agents is as much of a problem as the differences in syntax, since the ideal case would be for a model to be trained end-to-end for use with a specific agent and set of tools, as I believe Anthropic do. Any agent interacting with a model that wasn't specifically trained to work with that agent/toolset is going to be at a disadvantage.