Agent Mode - model recommendations

[planetf1]

I'm struggling to get any model (suitable for 32GB macbook m1, served via ollama) working very much at all with agent mode.

Can anyone offer some decent models (for python/k8s/go coding) that work well in agent mode/for tool calling (including mcp) specifically with the continue plugin in vscode?

It can be as simple an example as 'can you list what charts I have' in the context of helm charts for example.

A typical response would be

{"name":"ls","arguments":{"dirPath":"/charts"}}

from the model, but not in the format continue agent mode appears to like

[ShaunaGordon]

That's the same model laptop I have. I've had good results with command-r7b, and the cogito models up to about 14b (8b has been a pretty good balance of speed and accuracy for quicker little stuff). What I like about Command-r7b is that it's designed for RAG, so its whole shtick is analyzing what you've got.

I've also gotten pretty good results with phi-4 (contrary to other people, apparently, but... 🤷‍♀️), but I haven't tried that one in agent mode.

The smaller qwen3.5 models and codestral/devstral are supposed to work well, too, but personally, when I've tried them, they didn't output anything. That was a couple Continue releases back, though, so it might have been fixed, or otherwise YMMV.

[planetf1]

I had some success using LMStudio instead of ollama & mlx (but I did download slightly different variants - which may have been slightly modified like unsloth) and both devstral (a little) and qwen3-coder (better) did work with continue a lot better. But very slow, and increasing the context, even to 32k needed k-v cache optimization. That made the results poor from qwen, so still hunting. I'll try the models you mentioned