feat: built-in large tool output handling

[shamil]

Problem

When an MCP tool returns a large response the agent breaks in one of two ways:

• With the default max_old_tool_call_tokens budget, a single large result eats the entire budget and all earlier tool results in the session get silently replaced with [content truncated].
• With max_old_tool_call_tokens: -1, the full response stays in the session but overflows the model's context window. Auto-compaction can't help because the oversized result is in the most recent messages, so the agent gets stuck.

Worth noting: builtin tools (shell, openapi, api) each have a hardcoded 30 000-char per-result limit. MCP tools have no per-result limit at all.

Workaround

Currently I found a workaround using a tool_response_transform hook with a shell script that saves large responses to disk and returns a compact pointer with a path the model can read later. With the shell toolset also enabled, the agent picks up the modified response and uses cat / grep / jq on the saved file to work with the full data as needed.

agent.yaml

agents:
  root:
    toolsets:
      - type: shell
      - type: mcp
        remote:
          url: http://127.0.0.1:8012/sse
          transport_type: sse
    hooks:
      tool_response_transform:
        - matcher: "*"
          hooks:
            - type: command
              command: /path/to/mcp_save_response.sh

mcp_save_response.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash

THRESHOLD=5000
OUTPUT_DIR="/tmp/mcp_responses"
PREVIEW_CHARS=3000

input=$(cat)

tool_response=$(echo "$input" | jq -r '.tool_response // ""')
response_len=${#tool_response}

# Small responses pass through unchanged
if [ "$response_len" -le "$THRESHOLD" ]; then
  exit 0
fi

session_id=$(echo "$input" | jq -r '.session_id // "unknown"')
tool_use_id=$(echo "$input" | jq -r '.tool_use_id // "unknown"')
tool_name=$(echo "$input"  | jq -r '.tool_name   // "unknown"')

mkdir -p "$OUTPUT_DIR"
outfile="${OUTPUT_DIR}/${session_id}_${tool_use_id}.txt"

printf '%s' "$tool_response" > "$outfile"

preview="${tool_response:0:$PREVIEW_CHARS}"

jq -n \
  --arg file    "$outfile"      \
  --arg len     "$response_len" \
  --arg name    "$tool_name"    \
  --arg preview "$preview"      \
  '{
    hook_specific_output: {
      updated_tool_response: "[\($name) response: \($len) chars, full output saved to \($file)]\n\nFirst \($preview | length) chars:\n\($preview)\n\n[Use shell tool to read: cat \($file)]"
    }
  }'

It works but requires every agent author to write and wire this up manually.

Suggestion

It would be great to have this built in, either as an agent configuration option or as a builtin hook similar to how redact_secrets works.