Back to Applied AI Engineering
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Phase 8
Harness Engineering & Tool Ecosystems
The unglamorous plumbing that makes agents reliable: validating and sandboxing tool calls, MCP for reusable tools, and human approval plus fallback handling for long-running work.
1
Tool Calling & Function Orchestration
Why a schema-valid tool call still isn't safe to execute blindly, and the validation and sandboxing layer that sits between a model and a live API.
tool-callingorchestrationsandboxing
2
MCP & Tool Interoperability
Why every worker agent hand-wiring its own copy of the order-lookup tool doesn't scale, and how the Model Context Protocol decouples tools from any one agent.
mcpmodel-context-protocolinteroperability
3
Long-Running Workflows, Human Approvals & Tool Reliability
Did the refund actually go through? Idempotency, checkpointed state, and pause-for-approval patterns for workflows that span hours instead of seconds.
human-in-the-loopstate-persistencereliability