I'm using this model right now in claude code with LM Studio perfectly, on a macbook pro

You mean Qwen3-Coder-Next? I haven't tried that model itself, yet, because I assume it's too big for me. I have a modest 16GB MacBook Air so I'm restricted to really small stuff. I'm thinking about buying a machine with a GPU to run some of these.

Anywayz, maybe I should try some other models. The ones that haven't worked for tool calling, for me are:

Llama3.1

Llama3.2

Qwen2.5-coder

Qwen3-coder

All these in 7b, 8b, or sometimes 30b (painfully) models.

I should also note that I'm typically using Ollama. Maybe LM Studio or llama.cpp somehow improve on this?