cruxial 0.2.0

The reliability layer for LLM tool calls. Intercepts every call, validates arguments against your schema, auto-repairs hallucinated args before execution.

Cruxial

The reliability layer for LLM tool calls.

Your agent said it sent the email. It didn't.

Cruxial intercepts every LLM tool call before it executes, validates arguments against your schema, and auto-repairs hallucinated args via a structured retry. Drop-in for OpenAI and Anthropic. <1ms p99 added overhead — validation is local, no extra network hop. Fail-open by default — if Cruxial itself errors, the tool still executes.

pip install cruxial

Then watch it catch every failure category live — offline, no API key:

cruxial demo

30-second demo

from cruxial import guard
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI()

# Standard OpenAI tool definitions
schemas = {
    "send_email": {
        "type": "object",
        "properties": {
            "to": {"type": "string", "format": "email"},
            "subject": {"type": "string", "maxLength": 200},
            "body": {"type": "string"},
        },
        "required": ["to", "subject", "body"],
    }
}

# Your actual executors
def send_email(to, subject, body):
    return mailer.send(to=to, subject=subject, body=body)

executors = {"send_email": send_email}

# Wrap once
cruxial = guard(schemas=schemas, executors=executors)

# In your agent loop:
for tool_call in llm_response.tool_calls:
    result = cruxial.execute(tool_call.name, tool_call.arguments)

    if not result.ok:
        # result.failure.category, .message, .repair_prompt
        # See "Auto-repair" below for the one-line fix
        raise result.failure.as_exception()

    use(result.value)

Or: one call does the whole turn

guard() gives you full control. If you write the usual raw-SDK loop, cruxial.run() does the entire tool step in one call — call the model, validate every tool call, execute the valid ones, auto-repair the bad ones in one round-trip, log, and append the results — for OpenAI / Azure / Anthropic / LiteLLM. You keep your loop:

import cruxial

result = cruxial.run(
    client,                 # your OpenAI / AzureOpenAI / Anthropic client, or litellm.completion
    model="gpt-4o",
    messages=messages,
    tools=tools,            # the same tool defs you already pass the LLM
    executors=executors,    # {tool_name: your_function}
)

while not result.finished:  # your loop stays yours — one model call per turn
    result = cruxial.run(client, model="gpt-4o", messages=result.messages,
                         tools=tools, executors=executors)

print(result.text)          # the model's final answer

It reuses your already-configured client (Azure endpoint/version, base_url, timeouts — all preserved), derives schemas from tools, and fails open. It is deliberately one turn, not a framework: no streaming, no multi-turn ownership — you decide when to stop. Need to own execution yourself? Drop to guard().check() / .execute().

What it catches

Eight failure categories. Every interception is logged with the failure category — never the raw argument values.

Category	What it catches
missing_required	Required field not in args
type_mismatch	Wrong type (int instead of str, etc.)
enum_violation	Value not in allowed enum
format_violation	Bad email / uri / date format
constraint_violation	maxLength / minimum / pattern / etc.
extra_field	Model invented a field that doesn't exist
unknown_tool	Tool name not in registry
tool_bypass	Model claimed it did something but emitted no call — "your agent said it sent the email. It didn't."

The first seven are schema-derivable. tool_bypass is the one validators structurally can't catch — there's no call to validate. See below.

tool_bypass — catch the action your agent claimed but never took

A model says "I've sent the email" and emits no send_email call. No error, no log, HTTP 200 — the silent failure. cruxial.run() catches it:

result = cruxial.run(client, model="gpt-4o", messages=messages,
                     tools=tools, executors=executors)   # bypass check is on by default

if result.bypass:        # the model claimed an action and, when re-prompted, confirmed it
    print("caught a bypass:", result.bypass.tool)

How it works (zero cost on normal turns): a final text turn is flagged only when it claims a completed action ("sent", not "send"), attributed to the assistant (not "you" / "the scheduler" / "automatically"), for a side-effecting tool that was never called. A flagged turn gets one neutral re-prompt — the model either re-emits the call (corrected + executed) or declines (we do nothing). We only ever act on a model-confirmed re-emission, so we never fabricate an action.

Benchmarked on a 132-scenario adversarial set (see BENCHMARKS.md): 100% correction recall, acted-on precision 100% (Claude sonnet-4-6) / 98.4% (gpt-4o). Set bypass="off" to disable; bypass="strict" for a 2-call variant.

Auto-repair (one line)

from cruxial.adapters.openai import auto_repair

cruxial = guard(schemas=schemas, executors=executors)
result = cruxial.execute(name, args)

if not result.ok:
    # 1-attempt structured retry with the failure injected into context
    new_args = auto_repair(client, model, messages, schemas, result.failure)
    result = cruxial.execute(name, new_args)

Roughly 90% of intercepted calls are fixed in a single repair round-trip on the pooled live-MCP benchmark (66–92% across models and schema complexity). Every number is sourced in BENCHMARKS.md.

See your interception rate

Every interception is written to a local SQLite file (no data leaves your machine). To see your real rate:

cruxial stats

Stats are project-local automatically. When you run cruxial stats from inside a project (any directory with .git/, pyproject.toml, setup.py, or .cruxial/), the database lives at ./.cruxial/telemetry.sqlite — keeping each app's stats separate. Outside a project it falls back to ~/.cruxial/telemetry.sqlite. Override either with the CRUXIAL_DB_PATH=/some/path env var (respected by both the SDK and the CLI). Run cruxial diagnostic to see which path is in effect.

Output:

cruxial · last 24h
─────────────────────────────────────────
  total calls           1,247
  intercepted             184  (14.8%)
  auto-repaired           167  (90.8% of intercepted)
  passed through        1,063

top failing tools                    rate
  send_email                        23.1%
  create_calendar_event             18.4%
  search_web                         9.2%

top failure categories
  type_mismatch                       62
  missing_required                    44
  enum_violation                      38
  format_violation                    24
  constraint_violation                16

How it works

sequenceDiagram
    participant M as LLM model
    participant C as Cruxial guard
    participant T as Your tool / executor
    participant DB as Local SQLite telemetry

    M->>C: tool call (name, args)
    C->>C: validate args vs JSON Schema
    alt args valid
        C->>DB: record PASSED (hashes only)
        C->>T: run tool
        T-->>M: result
    else args invalid
        C->>DB: record INTERCEPTED + failure category
        opt auto-repair enabled
            C-->>M: repair prompt (1-shot retry)
            M->>C: corrected tool call
        end
        C-->>M: typed failure (caller decides what to do)
    end

Cruxial wraps the tool registry, not the LLM client. No monkey-patching, no proxies, no framework lock-in.

Schema source — read this if your LLM sees a trimmed schema

If your code maintains TWO views of each tool schema — the canonical full one (used internally for execution) and a trimmed view sent to the LLM (the L1 / model-visible schema) — register the trimmed one with Cruxial, not the canonical.

Why: the LLM can only satisfy the schema it was shown. If the canonical has fields the LLM never saw, missing_required and extra_field interceptions become false positives — the model didn't fail, you just validated against the wrong contract.

# Right
cruxial = guard(schemas=tool_definitions_sent_to_llm)

# If you must register the canonical schema, opt in explicitly:
cruxial = guard(
    schemas=canonical_definitions,
    config=GuardConfig(schema_origin="canonical"),  # warns + tags every row
)

schema_origin="canonical" does NOT change validation logic — it just emits a warning at construction, tags every telemetry row, and surfaces a notice in cruxial stats so you can later filter out the false positives if you decide to.

See it's wired up

cruxial stats shows the registry independently of traffic:

  registry              6 registered  ·  3 fired  ·  1 intercepted

Useful for the "is it even on?" moment after first install. If you see traffic but 0 interceptions, that's usually a well-behaved model on a simple schema — cruxial.testing.violation_payloads(schema) lets you fire a synthetic violation per category to verify end-to-end.

Privacy

By default Cruxial stores: tool name, schema fingerprint, failure category, timing. Never the argument values themselves. Hashes only.

The interceptor runs in your process. Your data never leaves your infrastructure unless you opt into Cruxial Cloud (coming soon).

What ships in v0.1

• ✅ Python SDK
• ✅ OpenAI + Azure OpenAI + Anthropic + LiteLLM (auto via normalization)
• ✅ JSON Schema validation
• ✅ 7 failure categories
• ✅ 1-attempt auto-repair
• ✅ Local SQLite + stdout telemetry
• ✅ cruxial stats CLI
• ✅ Fail-open by default
• ✅ cruxial.run() — one managed turn (OpenAI / Azure / Anthropic / LiteLLM)
• ✅ tool_bypass detection — the claimed-but-never-called catch

Coming:

• TypeScript SDK
• LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen adapters
• Hosted dashboard with cross-customer schema drift alerts
• Pydantic / Zod custom validators

License

MIT. The SDK runs entirely in your process. The hosted dashboard (Cruxial Cloud) will be a separate paid product. The interceptor itself stays MIT forever.