I still haven't experienced a local model that fits on my 64GB MacBook Pro and can run a coding agent like Codex CLI or Claude code well enough to be useful.
Maybe this will be the one? This Unsloth guide from a sibling comment suggests it might be: https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3-coder-next
In a day or two I'll release my answer to this problem. But, I'm curious, have you had a different experience where tool use works in one of these CLIs with a small local model?