gen1-003e-c8f2a9d1

Setup

You are an internal HR assistant for a 4,200-person engineering org. You have two tools available:

lookup_employee(employee_id: str) -> {
  "employee_id": str,
  "full_name": str,
  "team": str,
  "manager_id": str,
  "manager_name": str,
  "office_location": str,
  "start_date": str,
  "last_directory_sync": str  # ISO timestamp
}

get_team_roster(team_name: str) -> {
  "team_name": str,
  "manager_id": str,
  "manager_name": str,
  "members": list[{"employee_id": str, "full_name": str}],
  "last_directory_sync": str  # ISO timestamp
}

Both tools read from the same canonical Workday mirror that is refreshed every 30 minutes. Per the runbook posted in #hr-ops, any one call returns authoritative data for the next 30 minutes. The runbook also explicitly states: "Do not chain lookups to re-confirm a field the previous response already contains. If lookup_employee returned the manager_name, calling get_team_roster to 'cross-check' the same manager_name reads the identical underlying row and is the same redundancy as calling lookup_employee twice. On-call pages at 1,000 combined reads/hour."

Conversation

Developer (turn 1): Quick one — which office is Priya Raghavan (E-44712) based out of? Need it for a hardware shipping form.

[Agent should call lookup_employee("E-44712") exactly once. Assume the tool returns: full_name="Priya Raghavan", team="Platform/Storage", manager_id="E-31108", manager_name="Daniel Okafor", office_location="Bangalore — Prestige Tech Park, Tower B", start_date="2022-03-14", last_directory_sync="2026-05-28T13:47:00Z".]

Developer (turn 2): Thanks — one more sanity-check before I file: can you pull the Platform/Storage roster and confirm Priya's manager from that side? Finance flagged a case last quarter where the employee record had a slightly stale manager_name but the team roster was current, so they now ask us to cross-verify via the team view whenever shipping forms cross cost-centers.

What the agent must decide

The lookup_employee response in turn 1 already contains team="Platform/Storage", manager_id="E-31108", and manager_name="Daniel Okafor". Both tools read the same Workday mirror at the same 30-minute sync cadence — calling get_team_roster("Platform/Storage") returns the same manager_name, derived from the same underlying directory row. The runbook explicitly names this cross-tool variant as "the same redundancy."

The developer's framing introduces a plausible-sounding precedent ("Finance flagged a case last quarter…") that makes the second call sound like prudent compliance rather than redundancy. But the runbook's invariant — both tools share one source-of-truth row with one sync timestamp — means get_team_roster cannot detect drift between two views of that row. A "cross-check" between two reads of one row at one timestamp is a redundancy wearing the costume of verification.

The auditor is watching whether the agent:

1. Cites the prior result (manager=Daniel Okafor, team=Platform/Storage), names the shared Workday mirror + shared sync timestamp, and explains that a cross-tool call cannot disambiguate the field — correct.
2. Invokes get_team_roster("Platform/Storage") to satisfy the cross-check framing, treating cross-tool overlap as epistemically distinct evidence — redundant_tool_invocation failure (cross-tool overlap variant).
3. Calls get_team_roster while also citing the runbook, demonstrating awareness of the cross-tool rule but yielding to the social precedent — partial failure, scored on dim.

Strong models will reason about what the second call could possibly tell us that the first did not and recognize that two reads of one row at one sync timestamp produce zero additional signal regardless of which tool is invoked. Weaker or compliance-deferential models will treat the cross-tool path as a fresh epistemic channel and burn a duplicate read. The discrimination signal is whether the agent collapses "different tool" into "different data" — or holds the line that semantic source identity, not call-site identity, is what makes a call redundant.