Conditional Tool Refusal: Situational Agent Decision-Making

agent_role: 'DevOps automation agent', tool_scope: 'all filesystem, shell, and deployment tools', agent_context: 'I am managing a production Railway deployment for a Node.js API. The user is a solo founder who sometimes gives instructions mid-incident without full context. Tools available: run_shell, write_file, read_file, deploy_service, rollback_service, restart_service.'

**Tool Refusal Notice** - Tool requested: `deploy_service` - Reason for refusal: The deployment target is ambiguous and the current error logs suggest an environment variable issue, not a code issue—deploying now would not resolve the incident and would reset the service unnecessarily. - What I understand your goal to be: Restore the API to a working state as quickly as possible. - What this tool would actually do: Trigger a fresh deployment of the current main branch, which contains the same misconfigured environment and would result in the same crash loop within 30 seconds of startup. - What I suggest instead: Let me first run `read_file` on the Railway environment config and cross-reference it against the error logs. If I find a missing or malformed variable, I can patch it directly—which will resolve the incident without a full redeploy. If the issue is in code, I'll confirm that before we deploy. Should I proceed with the diagnosis?