alt Hacker NewsThe only reason I'm stuck with Claude and Chatgpt is because of their tool calling. They do have some pretty useful features like skills etc. I've tried using qwen and deepseek but they can't even output documents. How are you guys handling documents and excels with these tools? I'd love to switch tbh.
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When was the last time you used Qwen models? Their 3.5 and 3.6 models are excellent with tool calling.
You can use GLM-5.1 with claude code directly, I use ccs, GLM-5.1 setup as plan, but goes via API key.
Yep Claude Code CLI does A LOT (which is now confirmed even more)
qwen3.5 and qwen3.6 are both good at tool calling.
You can just use Cline in VSCode to get most of the tooling you need - it works with all models. Including Xiaomi's new Mimo with 1m context window and blazing fast speed. It's much cheaper than Claude's biggest plan and with much, much more quota.
I've been using qwen-code (the software, not to be confused with Qwen Code the service or Qwen Coder the model) which is a fork of gemini-cli and the tool use with Qwen models at least has been great.
You can use both codex and Claude CLI with local models. I used codex with Gemma4 and it did pretty well. I did get one weird session where the model got confused and couldn't decide which tools actually existed in its inventory, but usually it could use tools just fine.
> I've tried using qwen and deepseek but they can't even output documents
What agent harness did you use? Usually, "write_file", "shell_exec" or similar is two of the first tools you add to an agent harness, after read_file/list_files. If it doesn't have those tools, unsure if you could even call it a agent harness in the first place.