You and I clearly have a different idea of what "very very simple stuff" involves.
Even the small models are very capable of stringing together a short sequence of simple tool calls these days - and if you have 32GB of RAM (eg a ~$1500 laptop) you can run models like gpt-oss:20b which are capable of operating tools like bash in a reasonably useful way.
This wasn't true even six months ago - the local models released in 2025 have almost all had tool calling specially trained into them.
You mean like a demo for simple stuff? Something like hello world type tasks? The small models you mentioned earlier are incapable of doing anything genuinely useful for daily use. The few tasks they can handle are easier and faster to just write yourself with the added assurance that no mistakes will be made.
I’d love to have small local models capable of running tools like current SOTA models, but the reality is that small models are still incapable, and hardly anyone has a machine powerful enough to run the 1 trillion parameter Kimi model.
Yes, I mean a demo for simple stuff. This whole conversation is attached to an article about building the simplest possible tool-in-a-loop agent as a learning exercise for how they work.
Even the small models are very capable of stringing together a short sequence of simple tool calls these days - and if you have 32GB of RAM (eg a ~$1500 laptop) you can run models like gpt-oss:20b which are capable of operating tools like bash in a reasonably useful way.
This wasn't true even six months ago - the local models released in 2025 have almost all had tool calling specially trained into them.