Comment by jxmesth
18 hours ago
The 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.
> 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.
Sorry for the confusion, I was actually talking about their Web based chat. Since most of my work is governance and docs, I just use their Web chats and they just refuse to output proper documents like Claude or Chatgpt do.
Aha... Well, I let Codex (Claude Code would work too) manage/troubleshoot .xlsx files too, seems to handle it just fine (it tends to un-archive them and browse the resulting XML files without issues), seen it do similar stuff for .app and .docx files too so maybe give that a try with other harnesses/models too, they might get it :)
1 reply →
You're not giving an AI command line access to your work computer? How do you expect to keep up? /s
8 replies →
You can make a harness fully functional with just the "shell_exec" tool if you give it access to a linux/unix environment + playwright cli.
When was the last time you used Qwen models? Their 3.5 and 3.6 models are excellent with tool calling.
I gave it a try a few weeks ago tbh, I'll give it another shot tho. I mainly use their Web chats since that's easier to use and previously, qwen, deepseek, kimi, all were unable to output proper docx files or use skills.
Try loading the models up in a coding harness like Claude Code. There's a few docx skills listed on Vercel's skill index.
https://skills.sh/tfriedel/claude-office-skills/docx
outputting docx files does not have much to do with model capability. it is about whether tool calling has be configured .
You can use GLM-5.1 with claude code directly, I use ccs, GLM-5.1 setup as plan, but goes via API key.
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.
Yep Claude Code CLI does A LOT (which is now confirmed even more)
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.
qwen3.5 and qwen3.6 are both good at tool calling.
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.