Schema First Tool APIs for LLM Agents: A Controlled Study of Tool Misuse, Recovery, and Budgeted Performance
Tool use has become central to modern LLM agents, yet interface design is rarely isolated as an experimental variable. This paper studies whether schema based tool contracts and structured validation diagnostics improve reliability under strict interaction budgets. We evaluate three conditions that preserve identical tool semantics and information content: free form documentation, JSON Schema specifications, and JSON Schema with structured diagnostics. We implement a deterministic software engineering sandbox with logs, metrics, configurations, and repository tasks, and evaluate a fully crossed pilot with one open local model, three seeds, three interface conditions, and four budgets. We ...
| Authors | Akshey Sigdel, Rista Baral |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 12 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 March 2026 |
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