CCARF Practice Question

Paper 5 · Question 41

D2 Tool Design & MCP Integration · Paper 5

[Scenario: Conversational AI Architecture Patterns] Production monitoring shows your `search_catalog` tool fails 12% of the time: 8% are network timeouts that succeed when retried, and 4% are query syntax errors that never succeed regardless of retries. Currently both error types are returned identically, causing wasted retries. How should you modify the tool's error handling?

• A.Add few-shot examples to your system prompt demonstrating how to distinguish network errors from syntax errors.
• B.Apply exponential backoff retry logic to all errors uniformly.
• C.Implement automatic retry with backoff for network timeouts inside the tool; return syntax errors immediately with parameter validation details.
• D.Return all errors with a `retryable` boolean flag and error type details.

Show answer & explanations

Correct answer: C

A: Examples ask the model to classify errors the tool already understands. The tool should not hand that judgment off.

B: Backoff on every error retries syntax failures that cannot succeed. That is the wasted 4%.

C: Handling retries at the tool level for transient errors is the correct abstraction boundary—the tool has definitive knowledge of the error type and can implement deterministic retry logic without relying on the agent to interpret a flag (D) or follow prompt-level instructions (A). Uniform backoff (B) wastes time on syntax errors that will never succeed.

D: A retryable flag still leaves the retry to the model, which is how the wasted retries happened. Timeouts should be retried inside the tool.

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