Should AI agent tool calls be synchronous or asynchronous?

Tanishk argues in Gaurav Sen's AI interview series that independent tool calls should be asynchronous. With synchronous calls, a second tool waits on the first, so a query that needs all five tools pays for each response in sequence. Tools that do not depend on each other's output can run async, while tools that are dependent and share a lot of work can be merged into one.

• Tools served through MCP are not async by default; Tanishk says you have to check what each MCP server supports.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on Gaurav Sen (2026-10-16). Read the whole episode summary →

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