We removed 80% of our agent’s tools

Vercel rebuilt its internal text-to-SQL agent d0 by replacing 16 specialized tools with a single tool that executes arbitrary bash commands, giving Claude Opus 4.5 direct access to the file system.

The new agent achieved a 100% success rate (up from 80%), 3.5x faster execution, 37% fewer tokens, and 42% fewer steps across five benchmark queries.