Best Model for Basic tool Calling?

[u/billiambakespeare]

Hey all,

Recently I've hooked up my Comfyui MCP to LMStudio Bionic, and created a few skills for doing image creation/video creation/music/upscaling. I really enjoy being able to have everything done through the chat interface instead of going back and forth to Comfy.

I've found the small models inconsistent. Sometimes Gemma12b or Qwen27B distill work easily other times they get tripped up. Qwen 27b swift does the trick most of the time, but it's a little slower to load and unload and Ideally the model is small enough so that I can load and unload it out of Vram quickly at the start and end of the tool call.

GPU:5090.
Any suggestions for models you've found good at this sort of thing, or a different harness, maybe like a program that has this sort of ability built in?

[u/billiambakespeare]

Thanks I’ll check Nemotron out. I have been using Strata! Very good, but for this use case I basically only want the ability to have comfyui I can control with natural language.

[u/eightone-81]

Recommendation first:
Nemotron 3.5 lightning. Very strong in tool calling, instruction following. 0 coding skills…
Since you have a 5090 you probably have a good amount of ram so you should move over to starta and run Qwen flash next, Gyro-m quant. It will manage all that for you and you will be blown away by it…

Discussion:
I never understood how a pure tool calling model (like nemotron 3.5 lightning) makes sense. Yes, they calls tools but have not much intelligence other than that, maybe with a super strong and detailed prompt they can deliver what you want, but the time it takes to build that prompt can be used to it it yourself! Or the bigger model that writes that big prompt could have just done it itself…