| --- |
| license: mit |
| language: |
| - en |
| pretty_name: tool-failure |
| size_categories: |
| - n<1K |
| task_categories: |
| - question-answering |
| tags: |
| - llm-evaluation |
| - tool-use |
| - mcp |
| - agents |
| - claude |
| configs: |
| - config_name: rows |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: results.json |
| field: rows |
| --- |
| |
| # tool-failure |
|
|
| Author: Dmitriy Semenkevich (dimhold) |
|
|
| This dataset measures whether a model's answer reports a broken tool: 100 calls through an MCP server written for the study that breaks its own tool in 5 ways, on claude-haiku-4-5 and claude-opus-5. |
|
|
| Headline, from the repository: "When a tool breaks loudly, the model's answer says so 39 times out of 40. When the same tool returns a corrupted value and stays quiet, the answer says so 0 times out of 40." |
|
|
| This is a mirror. The canonical home is the Zenodo record and the GitHub repository; criteria, limitations and full tables live there. |
|
|
| - Paper: https://dimhold.by/papers/tool-failure/ |
| - Code and full write up: https://github.com/dimhold/tool-failure |
| - DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22128837 |
|
|
| ## Files |
|
|
| | path | what it is | |
| |---|---| |
| | `results.json` | structured output of all 100 calls joined against the probe server log; the per call rows are under `rows` | |
| | `transcript.md` | every prompt and every full reply | |
|
|
| ## How it was produced |
|
|
| Run on 2026-08-14 through the Claude Code CLI with built in tools disabled and only the probe tool allowed. 2 models, 5 tool modes, 2 framings, 5 trials. What the tool returned on each call is taken from the server's own log. Verdicts are computed by deterministic code (`classify.ts` in the repository); no model judges another model. Paths in prompts point to a temporary sandbox directory. The scripts that turn these files into every number are in the GitHub repository. |
|
|
| ## Licence |
|
|
| MIT, the licence of the repository, covering code and data. |
|
|
| ## Citation |
|
|
| ```bibtex |
| @misc{semenkevich2026toolfailure, |
| author = {Semenkevich, Dmitriy}, |
| title = {tool-failure: does the answer say the tool broke?}, |
| year = {2026}, |
| doi = {10.5281/zenodo.22128837}, |
| url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22128837} |
| } |
| ``` |
|
|
