ReAct and Tool Usage (The Agents Season, Episode 2)

Before 2022, there was a wall between AI and the real world — models could reason impressively, but couldn't look anything up, run code, or check whether anything they said was actually true. This episode traces the moment that wall came down, through two landmark papers: ReAct, which showed what happens when you interleave reasoning and action in a loop, and Toolformer, which taught models to decide *for themselves* when to reach for a tool. Plus: what MCP actually is, and why a hobbyist project called Open Claw became the fastest-growing open source project in history. --- Website: Apple Podcasts: Spotify: Substack:

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ReAct and Tool Usage (The Agents Season, Episode 2) is an episode from Linear Digressions by Ben Jaffe and Katie Malone.

This episode is 00:23:41 long.

This episode was published on Apr 27, 2026.

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