Beyond the Chatbot: Master LLM Tool Calling 🛠️

What happens when an AI needs to do more than just generate text?
In this hands-on workshop, we'll explore tool calling, the mechanism that allows LLMs to interact with external functions, APIs, databases, and other systems.
We'll start with the fundamentals of how tool calling works, then build a simple application where an LLM can decide when to use a tool, generate the required arguments, process the result, and continue the conversation.
Along the way, we'll explore:

• How tool/function calling works
• Defining tools and their parameters
• How an LLM decides when and which tool to call
• Executing tool calls and returning results to the model
• Working with multiple tools
• How tool calling becomes a foundation for AI agents
• Common challenges such as invalid arguments, failures, and user confirmation

By the end of the session, you'll understand the full user → model → tool → model → response loop and have built a small tool-enabled AI application yourself.
Who is this for?
Anyone interested in the topic. You don't need prior experience building AI agents, but basic programming experience will be helpful.
Bring your laptop if you'd like to follow along.