An agent that cannot emit a clean tool call is useless — so we measure first

The single most common failure we see is silent: the model reasons beautifully and never produces a parseable tool call. It narrates its plan in prose instead of emitting the JSON that actually triggers the action. The agent looks smart and does nothing. We proved this to ourselves rather than trusting a leaderboard. In a head-to-head on modest local hardware, we scored two leading small models on an objective, machine-checked harness — routing, clean tool-call JSON, and complete hand-offs, three trials each. One model followed the tool-call contract every single time (15 out of 15). The "smarter" one, even with reasoning mode off, monologued its logic and never produced parseable JSON (6 out of 15, and 0 for 9 on the tool-call checks). It flipped our own initial preference. The lesson is the discipline: choose the model that works on your production criteria, measured and reproducible — not the one with the better brand or benchmark.

This is one piece of a larger framework we built and operate in production. The full picture — and how it applies to your business — is in the playbook.

We specialize in healthcare because it is the hardest vertical — strict HIPAA regulation, PHI handling, BAA chains, and zero tolerance for failure. If we can build it for healthcare, we can build it for any industry. We work across verticals.