OpenAI strict support for Microsoft.Extensions.AI

[skylarbpayne]

OpenAI has a strict option for tool calling which can be supplied:

1. At the request level for all tools in the request
2. At a per tool level

See OpenAI docs for details

It appears the base LlmTornado has support for this: The Tool class offers a strict parameter; though I'm not 100% sure this gets passed through to OpenAI.

However, there doesn't appear to be a way to set this from a Microsoft.Extensions.AI IChatClient.

Is there any appetite to support this? I am happy to contribute; if I could get some guidance on what would make most sense for LlmTornado here

[lofcz]

Yeah, Tornado works with strict tools. I'm not deeply familiar with MEAI capabilities - if there is some way to expose this on IChatClient level, we can do that. See ChatDemo2.cs, ChatDemo3.cs - there should be examples with strict tools/schema/stuff. You might be also interested in https://github.com/lofcz/LLMTornado/blob/master/src/LlmTornado.Demo/InfraDemo.cs and https://github.com/lofcz/LLMTornado/blob/master/src/LlmTornado.Demo/InfraDemo2.cs, since that's how we define tools in real world applications.

Note that the strict parameter is harmonized between providers with wildly different API shapes - OAI, Anthropic, Google. Hence the way it's defined in tools might look weird at a first glance.

[skylarbpayne]

Unfortunately, there's not a 'standardized' way that IChatClient takes it in, and I think this is by design. Instead, there's an AdditionalProperties that individual implementations can choose how they use; this exists both in ChatOptions and AITool.

So as an example, the standard OpenAI implementation uses the strict property to set this behavior:

• strict mode in OpenAI

So following this pattern, we could also parse out a strict property in additional properties from ChatOptions and/or AITool.

I'm not as familiar with internals of LlmTornado beyond the IChatClient interface, but if there's a standard 'options' type, might make sense to just parse everything out of AdditionalProperties that matches something in options (so all options llmtornado supports will have "out of the box" support with IChatClient).

[lofcz]

I'm open to accept a PR but you will probably run into more and more scenarios where MEAI just won't cut it. Using Tornado directly unlocks way more capabilities.