Which local models can actually handle tool calling?
I built a framework to find out.
15 scenarios. 12 tools. Mocked responses. Temperature 0. No cherry-picking.
Tested every Qwen3.5 size from 0.8B to 397B, and since some of you asked after the distillation tests: yes, I included Jackrong's Qwen3.5-27B-Claude-4.6-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled too.
Only two models went all green: the 27B dense and the distilled 27B.
The 397B? Failed two tests. The 122B? Failed one. The 35B? Failed two.
The timed-out results — mostly on the smaller models, are cases where the model got stuck in a loop, repeating the same tool call until it hit the 30-second limit.
The test that exposed the most models: "Search for Iceland's population, then calculate 2% of it." Simple, but 35B, 122B, and 397B all used a rounded number from memory instead of the actual search result. They didn't trust their own tool output.
Small models hallucinate data.
Big models ignore data.
The 27B just threaded it through.
