PRODUCTION SCENARIO
One assistant handles three workloads: SQL analysis, documentation writing, and compliance audits. All 42 tools sit in a single prompt, and each workload needs a different system prompt, a different tone, and a different escalation path. Audit traces show compliance tools being called during SQL sessions, which the compliance team treats as an access finding rather than a cost problem.
Which architecture best fixes the misrouting?
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Show answer and explanation
Answer: Route each request to a specialist subagent with only its own tools and instructions
Routing gives each workload its own instructions and its own tool surface, which is both what three different system prompts and escalation paths ask for and what turns the access finding into something a SQL session has no way to reach. Tool search is the right answer when context size is the problem: it shrinks what loads while leaving one prompt and one catalog, and a search can still surface a compliance tool. One parameterized tool is right when the 42 are variations on a single operation whose schemas are the bloat, and here it removes the boundary separating the workloads. Few-shot examples suit workloads that share instructions, and they make the wrong call less likely rather than out of reach.
Official Source: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-agents ↗