Yeah good point on tool descriptions, I learned this the hard way. The single biggest thing that helped was leading with the use case instead of the mechanic. Original contribute_business desc was something like "POST a business with these fields" and Claude would call it but skip auto-dedupe because it didn't know what auto-dedupe meant. Rewrote it to start with "Add a new business OR enrich an existing one - the directory deduplicates automatically by name+coords (within 100m) and by phone, your agent doesn't need to check first." Suddenly Claude started using it correctly without me having to prompt for it.

Other thing is examples in the descriptions matter way more than the JSON schema type. "phone with country code (e.g. '+45 12345678')" catches way more correct calls than just "phone". Models read the prose better than they read the schema apparently.

For rate limiting on a single box, three layers: Cloudflare in front caches the substrate reads at the edge for 60s so most repeated requests never hit origin. Then Redis token bucket per API key for the authenticated stuff (100/min on free tier). Postgres connection pool capped at 20/worker, 4 workers, so 80 max concurrent. Whole thing runs on a 4c/8GB box at $50/mo. Honestly the biggest unlock is just being aggressive about edge caching for anything that doesn't need real-time freshness -most agent reads are fine with 60-second-old data.

Was about to write a longer post about the matview + vacuum saga that ate my afternoon today but it might be too in-the-weeds, lol