We Removed 80% of the Agent Tools

It got better.

We spent months building a sophisticated internal text-to-SQL agent, d0, with specialized tools, heavy prompt engineering, and careful context management. It worked… kind of. But it was fragile, slow, and required constant maintenance.

So we tried something different. We deleted most of it and stripped the agent down to a single tool: execute arbitrary bash commands. We call this a file system agent. Claude gets direct access to your files and figures things out using grep, cat, and ls.

The agent got simpler and better at the same time. 100% success rate instead of 80%. Fewer steps, fewer tokens, faster responses. All by doing less.