I’m mostly out of the local model game, but I can say confidently that Llama will be a waste of time for agentic workflows - it was trained before agentic fine tuning was a thing, as far as I know. It’s going to be tough for tool calling, probably regardless of format you send the request in. Also 8b models are tiny. You could significantly upgrade your inference quality and keep your privacy with say a machine at lambda labs, or some cheaper provider, though. Probably for $1/hr - where an hour is a many times more inference than an hour on your MBA.
Re:Qwen3-Coder-Next
by breakingcups on Thursday February 05, 2026 @08:40AM
(#46899526)
I've not used Ollama in a long time, but I believe it aggressively quantizes models by default, leading to subpar performance.
Anywayz, maybe I should try some other models. The ones that haven't worked for tool calling, for me are:
Llama3.1
Llama3.2
Qwen2.5-coder
Qwen3-coder
All these in 7b, 8b, or sometimes 30b (painfully) models.
I should also note that I'm typically using Ollama. Maybe LM Studio or llama.cpp somehow improve on this?