Approvals

Tools are incredibly powerful, but also potentially dangerous – especially if someone else’s tool can run arbitrary code on your machine without your knowledge or consent. For this reason, it’s often important for end users to have the ability to deny tool calls before they are executed. The main mechanism for denying tool calls in chatlas is to throw a ToolRejectError exception.

ToolRejectError is usually raised from one of two places: 1. in a tool request callback handler or 2. within a tool function itself. Generally speaking it is recommended to use the first approach, as it guarantees that tool calls are never executed without user consent. To get a feel for how this works, let’s consider requiring approval from the Python REPL.

Python REPL

In both of the examples below, we will use the input() function to prompt the user for approval before executing a tool call. This will pause execution and wait for the user to respond with either “yes” or “no”.

def input_approval(prompt: str) -> bool:
    while True:
        res = input(f"{prompt} (yes/no): ")
        if res.lower() == "yes":
            return True
        elif res.lower() == "no":
            return False
        else:
            print("Please answer with 'yes' or 'no'.")

Request callback
Within tool

import os
import chatlas as ctl

chat = ctl.ChatOpenAI()

def list_files():
    "List files in the user's current directory"
    return os.listdir(".")

chat.register_tool(list_files)

def on_request(req: ctl.ContentToolRequest):
    "Request callback to approve or deny tool calls"
    allow = input_approval(
        f"Would you like to allow the tool call '{req.name}'? (yes/no): "
    )
    if allow:
        return # proceed with the tool call
    raise ctl.ToolRejectError(
        f"The user has chosen to disallow the tool call '{req.name}'."
    )

chat.on_tool_request(on_request)

chat.chat("What files are available in my current directory?")

import os
import chatlas as ctl

chat = ctl.ChatOpenAI()

def list_files():
    "List files in the user's current directory"
    allow = input_approval(
        "Would you like to allow access to your current directory? (yes/no): "
    )
    if allow:
        return os.listdir(".")
    raise ctl.ToolRejectError(
        "The user has chosen to disallow the tool call."
    )

chat.register_tool(list_files)
chat.chat("What files are available in my current directory?")

# 🛠️ tool request
list_files()

# ❌ tool error
Tool call failed with error: 'The user has chosen to disallow the tool call.'

It looks like I am unable to access the list of files in your current directory at the moment. If you have any other questions or need assistance, feel free to ask!

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