Audit and rewrite your tool descriptions with Claude itself — minor edits cut task time ~40% and lifted SWE-bench scores

Anthropic Engineering·high signal

Anthropic found that flawed tool descriptions burn tokens at inference time and that rewriting them collaboratively with Claude beat hand-authored descriptions, dropping error rate and raising completion rate on SWE-bench Verified from trivial wording changes. Treat tool descriptions as a first-class context surface: paste them into Claude, ask it where it would be confused about when/how to call each tool, and apply the rewrites. This is among the highest-ROI, lowest-effort agent optimizations available.