Yeah, I've noticed this with Qwen3, too. If I rig up a nonstandard harness than allows it to think before tool calls, even 30B A3B is capable of doing low-budge

Yeah, I've noticed this with Qwen3, too. If I rig up a nonstandard harness than allows it to think before tool calls, even 30B A3B is capable of doing low-budget imitations of the things o3 and similar frontier models do. It can, for example, make a surprising decent "web research agent" with some scaffolding and specialized prompts for different tasks. We need to start moving away from Chat Completions-style tool calls, and start supporting "thinking before tool calls", and even proper multi-step agent loops.