The whole premise is cheap models + skills + a team — so the control plane,
not the model, must guarantee action. Every adapter hardcoded
tool_choice:"auto", letting a weak model answer the kickoff with prose and
"succeed" having hired no one, delegated nothing, and said nothing.
Now the agent loop compels a tool call on the opening turn (tool_choice
plumbed through every backend: OpenAI/Responses/Chat, Anthropic, Codex,
Copilot, Azure, Custom, Gemini ANY mode, Bedrock any). If the forced turn
still yields no tool call, the run fails loudly instead of recording a
deceptive success — surfacing the problem (let it crash) rather than a
silent dead company. After it has acted, the model chooses freely.
Tested: a stub that rambles on "auto" but acts when forced now posts a
kickoff message; a prose-only first turn fails the run.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
ZacharyZhang-NYandClaude Opus 4.8
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