Sourced from ruby_llm's releases.

1.6.1

RubyLLM 1.6.1: Tool Choice Freedom and Error Recovery 🛠️

Quick maintenance release with important fixes for tool calling and error recovery. Shipped three days after 1.6.0 because why make you wait?

🎉 Milestone: 2,700+ GitHub stars and 1.9 million downloads! Thank you to our amazing community.

🔧 OpenAI Tool Choice Flexibility

OpenAI defaults to 'auto' when tools are present. We were hardcoding it, blocking your overrides:

# Before: Couldn't override tool_choice
chat.with_params(tool_choice: 'required')  # Ignored!
Now: Your choice wins
chat.with_params(tool_choice: 'required')  # Works as expected
chat.with_params(tool_choice: 'none')      # Disable tools temporarily
chat.with_params(tool_choice: { type: 'function', function: { name: 'specific_tool' }})  # Force specific tool

Thanks to @​imtyM for catching this and fixing it in #336.

🔄 Orphaned Tool Message Cleanup

Rate limits can interrupt tool execution mid-flow, leaving orphaned tool result messages. This caused 'tool_use without tool_result' errors on retry:

# The problem flow:
# 1. Tool executes successfully
# 2. Tool result message saved
# 3. Rate limit hits before assistant response
# 4. Retry fails: orphaned tool result confuses the API
Now: Automatic cleanup on error
chat.ask("Use this tool")  # Rate limit? No problem. Orphaned messages cleaned up.

The fix handles both orphaned tool calls and tool results, ensuring clean conversation state after errors.

🔄 Tool Switching Mid-Conversation

New replace: true parameter lets you completely switch or remove tool contexts during a conversation:

# Start with search tools
chat = RubyLLM.chat.with_tools([SearchTool, WikipediaTool])
chat.ask("Research Ruby's history")
Switch to code tools for implementation
</tr></table>

... (truncated)

• b2855b4 fix: skip flaky test for orphaned tool call messages on JRuby
• 91eb158 Appraisal update
• 68be598 Bump version to 1.6.1
• de600e9 Updated models
• bb3cfe1 Appraisal update
• 92de76c fix: Simplify orphaned tool message cleanup and fix JRuby compatibility
• b04dac3 fix: Make rate limit error mock compatible with Ruby 3.1
• 7869c9f fix: Make rate limit error mock compatible with Ruby 3.1
• 5d33920 New OpenAI cassettes after removal of tool_choice auto
• 5b28b8e Updated models
• Additional commits viewable in compare view

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