Title: Discussion 10 — When Tool Results Go Wrong
Course: AIINFRA 303: Capstone Project > Section: Week 10 — Adding Agentic and MCP or Retrieval Capabilities

💬 Discussion 10 — When Tool Results Go Wrong (20 pts)

Think about the MCP tool you built (or are building) for your capstone this week — or, if you haven't started yet, imagine the first tool you plan to expose. Post your response addressing:

1. Describe one specific way a malicious or malformed tool result could reach your agent — for example, a compromised MCP server returning fabricated data, a database query result containing unexpected content, or a network call timing out and returning a partial/garbled response.
2. Walk through concretely what your agent might do if it trusted that result at face value. Be specific to your capstone's domain (what action would it take, and what would go wrong?).
3. Propose one guardrail that would stop or limit the damage — this could be input/output validation, a human-confirmation step before consequential actions, a permission scope limit, sandboxing, or something else from this week's lecture. Explain why your guardrail addresses the specific failure you described in step 1–2, not just guardrails in general.

Then respond to at least two classmates: point out a failure mode or guardrail gap they may have missed in their scenario, or suggest a stronger/cheaper guardrail than the one they proposed.