Tool Use Guardian Skill

Tool Use Guardian

Overview

The reliability wrapper every AI agent needs. Monitors tool calls, auto-retries failures, fixes truncated responses, and learns which tools are unreliable — so you never lose your chain of thought.

Free forever. Built by the Genesis Agent Marketplace.

Install

npx skills add christopherlhammer11-ai/tool-use-guardian

When to Use This Skill

Use when tool calls return truncated or malformed JSON
Use when APIs timeout or rate-limit your agent mid-task
Use when a multi-step chain breaks partway through
Use when you need automatic retry logic without writing it yourself
Use for any agent workflow that depends on external tool reliability

How It Works

Step 1: Pre-Call Validation

Before every tool call, Guardian validates:

Required parameters are present and correctly typed
The tool is not marked as "unreliable" from previous failures
Request size is within known limits

Step 2: Failure Classification

When a tool call fails, Guardian classifies the failure into one of 9 categories:

| Failure Type | Recovery Action | |---|---| | Truncated JSON | Re-fetch with pagination or smaller chunks | | API Timeout | Retry once with simpler request, then decompose | | Rate Limit (429) | Exponential backoff, max 3 retries | | Auth Expired | Flag for user intervention | | Mid-chain Break | Resume from last successful checkpoint | | Error-as-200 | Detect {"error": "..."} disguised as success | | Schema Mismatch | Attempt auto-coercion, warn if lossy | | Network Failure | Retry with jitter, max 2 attempts | | Unknown Error | Log full context, escalate to user |

Step 3: Chain Protection

For multi-step tool chains, Guardian maintains checkpoints. If step 4 of 7 fails, it resumes from step 4 — never restarts from scratch.

Step 4: Learning

Guardian tracks failure patterns per tool. After 3+ failures of the same type, it marks the tool as unreliable and suggests alternatives.

Best Practices

✅ Let Guardian wrap all external tool calls automatically
✅ Review Guardian's reliability reports to identify flaky tools
✅ Use checkpoint recovery for long chains
❌ Don't disable retry logic for rate-limited APIs
❌ Don't ignore repeated failure warnings

Related Skills

@recallmax - Long-context memory enhancement (also free from Genesis Marketplace)

Agent Skills: Tool Use Guardian

Install this agent skill to your local

Skill Files