Reducing tool-use thrashing in agents

My agent keeps oscillating between a search API and a calculator when its confidence hovers around 0.55–0.65, burning 5–8 tool calls per task and bloating context by about 2k tokens. Has a lightweight gating strategy (hysteresis, short cooldown, or uncertainty-based suppression) stabilized your runs, and if so, what thresholds worked for you on o3-mini or similar?

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