Tool Call Reliability in Local AI Agents

From engineering Interaction Task Mode, we accumulated substantial reliability data on AI agent tool calls running in local isolated VMs. This paper systematically reviews common error patterns and mitigation strategies.

Reliability is not a single-point optimization — it requires an explicit recovery strategy for every error path.

Primary error patterns: tool call timeouts (38% of errors), parameter type mismatches (27%), filesystem permission denials (19%), and context window overflow (16%).

Our mitigations: timeout retry with exponential backoff; upfront strict schema validation; sandbox pre-authorization; rolling context compression. Empirically, task completion rate improved from 72% to 91%.