| name | local-tool-reliability |
| description | Use when local Copilot/Qwen tool calls fail, malformed tool JSON appears, tools are skipped, or LLM Gateway agent mode is flaky. |
| argument-hint | [tool-call symptom or error message] |
Local Tool Reliability
Debug and stabilize local-model tool calling before changing application code.
Procedure
- Separate server health from agent-tool health.
- Confirm
llama-server is running and /v1/models responds.
- Send a tiny direct chat-completions request to confirm basic generation.
- If the server is healthy but Copilot fails, suspect gateway, prompt size, or tool-set bloat next.
- Check local-model gateway settings.
github.copilot.llm-gateway.agentTemperature: 0.0 for tool mode.- Start with
parallelToolCalling: false for Qwen.
- Keep
enableToolCalling: true unless isolating a basic chat failure.
- Use a long enough
requestTimeout for large local prompts.
- Check Qwen llama-server launch settings.
- Use Jinja chat templates (
--jinja).
- Preserve Qwen thinking when needed for multi-turn tool use (
preserve_thinking: true).
- Use the
qwen3_coder tool parser where available.
- Keep KV cache at
q8_0 when reliability matters.
- Trim the tool surface.
- Disable MCP servers and extension tools the task does not need.
- Prefer one well-named tool over overlapping tools.
- Make argument names and types unambiguous.
- Use absolute paths.
- Prefer plain-text or search-replace edit formats over giant JSON payloads.
- Reduce the prompt before blaming the parser.
- Start a fresh chat and retry with a minimal reproduction.
Output Contract
Return:
- Whether the failure is server, gateway, parser, tool-set, or context-size.
- The smallest reliability setting change to try.
- A validation step.
- Whether the change trades speed for correctness.
References
