Equation 33 · The Token Tax of Giving a Model More Tools
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None of the fixes are exotic, and none of them requires giving anything up. Load lazily, so a large catalogue’s fixed and variable tax is paid only for the slice of it a given request actually needs. Shortlist by relevance rather than showing everything, because the retrieval-gap and confusion-gap terms trade against each other and a fixed list size cannot sit at the right point for every catalogue at once. Namespace explicitly, so a collision between two identically named tools is never the reason a well-retrieved shortlist still gets miscalled. And keep the schemas themselves lean, because a smaller is the one lever that helps regardless of how the other three are tuned. Giving a…
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None of the fixes are exotic, and none of them requires giving anything up. Load lazily, so a large catalogue’s fixed and variable tax is paid only for the slice of it a given request actually needs. Shortlist by relevance rather than showing everything, because the retrieval-gap and confusion-gap terms trade against each other and a fixed list size cannot sit at the right point for every catalogue at once. Namespace explicitly, so a collision between two identically named tools is never the reason a well-retrieved shortlist still gets miscalled. And keep the schemas themselves lean, because a smaller is the one lever that helps regardless of how the other three are tuned. Giving a model more tools is not free, and the documentation and the benchmarks now agree closely enough on where the bill actually falls that “just add more tools” is no longer a defensible default — it is a choice with a measured price attached, on both sides of the ledger.
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