alt Hacker NewsThe tool-call ambiguity point — yeah, I hit that at frontier scale too. Running Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini CLI in parallel for daily dev, the most common failure mode I see is grep/find returning exit code 1 (no matches): the model reads it as "the tool failed" instead of "search ran, here's the negative space," then either bails or retries with slightly different syntax instead of broadening the search.
The retry-nudge layer maps almost 1:1 to what I do manually multiple times an hour: "no, that wasn't a tool failure, the file just doesn't contain that pattern, try X." Encoding it at the framework level is the right shape.
Have you looked at whether these guardrails close the smaller frontier-model gap on long-horizon tasks? My intuition is the 87→99 delta on Sonnet won't quite hold past ~50 steps, where context drift starts dominating more than retry semantics.
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I almost said "it's jarring to see a human speaking fluent claude" but then I realized you're just a spambot.
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That's where frontier pulls ahead for sure, at least on the big frontier models - though I haven't formalized those findings because...time.
Necessary disclaimer, forge isn't concerned, technically, with model quality, just execution of tool calls. Now for the actual answer...
What I found to be the limiting factor with small models in the 14B range was "effective attention". Beyond a certain point, still well within their training context window size, I start to see degradation. I don't have hard numbers for it, but that's where an Opus and the like can just keep going for ages. I did come up with a tool call message history collapse that I might dogfood into forge one day (effectively clean up the message history intelligently so the model doesn't lose track as easily).
That being said, my coding eval suite for my agentic coding harness does have some refactor tasks and feature additions (everything is done on an actual sandboxed repo) and the small models can knock out those tasks even while pushing the 50-60 tool call mark. But I wouldn't trust them to do more than 1 of those in the same session.