I Tested 13 Local LLMs on Tool Calling: March 2026
I built a deterministic eval harness and tested 13 local LLMs on tool calling (function calling) to find out which models work decently well for agentic tasks. The result that surprised me most: a 3.4 GB model scored higher than everything else I tested, including models five times its size. If you’re running a local AI stack with Open WebUI, LM Studio, or any OpenAI-compatible frontend, tool calling is one of the key features that enables agentic behavior. It lets