Equation 22 · Part 10 · The Token Tax of Giving a Model More Tools
subtraction
subtraction
What this part means
Subtract the following term or group from the preceding one. A leading minus marks a negative quantity.
Its job in the formula
Subtract the following term or group from the preceding one. A leading minus marks a negative quantity.
Full expression→subtraction→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
Anthropic’s Tool Search Tool is a direct, documented implementation of that idea. The mechanism is described plainly: “You provide all your tool definitions to the API, but mark tools with defeoading: true to make them discoverable on-demand,” with a lightweight search tool — built-in options include BM25-based and regex-based search — querying an index of names and descriptions, and the full definition of a matching tool injected into context only once the model actually requests it [ 5 ] . The search tool itself is not free, but its overhead is small and fixed rather than proportional to catalogue size: “Only the Tool Search Tool loaded upfront (~500 tokens)” [ 5 ] . Applied to the same…
Learn the underlying idea
Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.
Open the illustrated addition and subtraction in an equation guide →
Sources cited in the surrounding passage
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.