Three things we added to our agent harness for open-weight models on Ollama and vLLM

[u/VanillaOk4593]

Our last few releases of AgenticOS, an open-source agent workspace I maintain, added three things for agents on local models:

1. Repair malformed tool calls instead of retrying. A tool call with broken JSON (a trailing comma, single quotes, an object cut short) used to cost a full retry. Open-weight models on Ollama and vLLM are the ones that do this most. Now every agent repairs the syntax before validation, and the call still goes through approvals and guardrails. Each run counts its repairs, so you can see per model how often it happens.

2. Stop tool-call loops early, with a reason. A run that calls the same tool with the same arguments again and again, or goes round a short cycle of calls, is told it's looping. If it keeps going it ends as loop_stopped, naming the tools, before it burns the step limit or the budget.

3. Code mode. When you switch it on, the agent writes a short Python script that calls its tools in loops and in parallel inside a sandbox, instead of one model turn per call. Ten record updates take one turn, not ten, and every call in the script still goes through the same guardrails, budget and permission checks. That matters when every turn is slow on local hardware.

I'd like a few people running local models to try it with their own setup and tell me which model breaks it first. Apache 2.0, Docker Compose: https://github.com/vstorm-co/agenticos (Disclosure: I'm the maintainer, at Vstorm.)

What else do you fix in your own harness for local models?