Every LLM Tool Call Needs an Output Budget (opens in new tab)

Tool outputs can quietly explode cost, latency, and context usage. A short user request can become a huge model request if tools return verbose API objects, metadata, comments, logs, or too many results. The fix is not to give up on tools. It is to profile real agent traces and treat tool output as a first-class optimization problem: return the minimum useful information by default, with drill-down paths when more is needed.