[authorfly]

Well often the code at the end of the day just reads data from a database or processes it in some way that relies on moving bits around / operations that the LLM on its own cannot do.

IMO Tool is a bad word for the majority of the use cases ("calculator", "weather API"). It's more like giving the LLM an old school calculator + a constrained data retriever.

Because you or somebody you entrust knows every line of code in the functions ultimately called at a high-ish level, you can do it, and know it is only really receiving data, not taking arbitrary action.

Now letting it rampantly run a python process arbitrarily etc, that'd be different, I suppose that fits in. But I think this is largely NOT how people are using tools since if you do that, how do you ever usefully know how to get the output of running it and apply that output?

[polotics]

It's "function calling" that's the even worst naming IMHO, as the point is that the LLM is not actually calling a function, but just proposes a function call... Who will out themselves as having come up with this confusion?