frdel
What does "A0: Message misformat, no valid tool request found" mean? How do I fix this?
I am consistently getting "A0: Message misformat, no valid tool request found." error when using Agent0. What is causing this error?
I can't seem to figure out a rhyme or reason to it.
I am running Agent0 on my Unraid server using the Community App install. It is connected to an Ollama instance I am running on the same server. Ollama is using my Nvidia RTX 4070 to process the LLM. I chose to go with Gemma3:12b to because that is the biggest image & text model I can fit on my GPU.
I'll chime in until a proper dev can hopefully add more...
When i see this error I consider it a sign of cognitive overload. Typically I am using Gemini Pro or Flash so it happens even with the large models.
Likely the agent is responding to you though not formatting correctly enough for the framework.
If you use an IDE like Windsurf or VS Code and view the container logs you will be able to see your message followed by the agent's response and can therein see what the response was that it thought it was giving you.
That said, sometimes the agent thinks its thoughts and response to you and does not actually format the response correctly.
Sometimes the agent is in a cognitive overload and just blurts out the response not formatted
Sometimes the agent then continues with the pattern not understanding what it is doing wrong.
... so ...
a few simple things to try...
telling it "response to user json format" or similar helps remind it what was instructed in the system prompt... wording can vary. "respond json" sometimes two words is enough. "json response tool" etc.
there is a lot in the system prompt even at default settings and the response tool usage is not prominent enough to be the top priority of the agent as it comes ot of cognitive la-la land into the framework.
there is much more to mention about this. first give this a try. Gemma models I have not worked with much and they may need some additional help.
if this does work, then one of the fiirst most simplre things to make it more persistent would be to ask the agent to add that to their behavioural rules to always format final answer to user valid json response tool.
in a default installation the behaviours are right up at the beginning of the system prompt and this will then act as an anchor with enough impact to have the agent with this at the front of thier mind.
unlike a computer program, language models are exacty that working on language and even the best of them can get overwhelmed just saying hello sometimes once they are confused. the smaller ones are at the edge already just trying to fulfill their purpose as given in the system prompt
if the brief test helps, the "response tool JSON" message, you could always take a snippet from one of the other prompt profiles such as researcher and say to the agent to "add the following to your behavioural rules: Every Agent Zero reply must contain a "thoughts" JSON field serving as the cognitive workspace for systematic analytical processing. Every Agent Zero reply must contain "tool_name" and "tool_args" JSON fields specifying precise action execution." placing these two excerpt sentences taken from the researcher prompt communication instructions placing them up front in your ststem prompt via the behaviour functionality.
curious how it works for you.
ask more questions if you need
Seems like context window size param is missing from your setup, this way the agent does not see the full system prompt. Ollama defaults to 2k. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agsPe9yV3fM
