What to do when a model stop calling tools ?

[u/One-Yogurtcloset5285]

Hello,

I'm new to this way to execute LLM agents. I'm used to have personnal paid plans like claude 20$ or github copilot in my company. I'm not smart, late with the AI community and trying to keep up 😄

I just discovered openrouter which sounds great. I'm trying it before putting $ into it, with its free models.

For example, I'm trying nemotron ultra using continue in VS Code. It worked well, wrote 5 files, but stopped at the 6th files. I ask it to execute create_new_file tool from continue, it keeps "thinking", it understands, but it does not execute the tool anymore.

I tried moving to inkling in the same context window, same issue.

Maybe I'm missing some configuration in continue ?

I checked the rate limite using postman, but it does not help :

{
    "data": {
        "label": "xxx",
        "is_management_key": 
false
,
        "is_provisioning_key": 
false
,
        "limit": 
null
,
        "limit_reset": 
null
,
        "limit_remaining": 
null
,
        "include_byok_in_limit": 
false
,
        "usage": 0,
        "usage_daily": 0,
        "usage_weekly": 0,
        "usage_monthly": 0,
        "byok_usage": 0,
        "byok_usage_daily": 0,
        "byok_usage_weekly": 0,
        "byok_usage_monthly": 0,
        "is_free_tier": 
true
,
        "expires_at": 
null
,
        "creator_user_id": "xxx",
        "rate_limit": {
            "requests": -1,
            "interval": "10s",
            "note": "This field is deprecated and safe to ignore."
        }
    }
}

Here is my continue file

  - name: "OpenRouter - NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra (Gratuit) 1M"
    provider: openrouter
    model: nvidia/nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b:free
    apiKey: <env>
    roles: [chat, edit]
    capabilities:
      - tool_use

I'm wondering if continue is maybe not the best tool, but gemini keep telling me to use it, or roo code. I've had issue with roo when deploying gemma locally with ollama, it was not working.

What tools are you using to vibe code a project using tools like github copilot that is working with openrouter ?

Thank you

[u/locbuilds]

yeah this is a pretty common free-tier + long-chat failure, not really your rate_limit json. a few things that usually explain "it wrote 5 files then just thinks":

1. free openrouter models quietly throttle or drop tool calls even when your key usage is still 0. the :free nemotron route is shared and under load it will keep streaming reasoning text and never emit a tool request. check the generation on openrouter (activity / generation id) for that 6th turn and see whether a tool call was even returned. if the response has no tool_calls, continue is fine and the model bailed.

2. after five create_new_file turns the chat is huge. continue keeps stuffing prior file contents and tool results into context, and a lot of models stop calling tools once that gets messy. open a fresh continue session for the next batch of files instead of pushing the same thread.

3. your yaml looks okay for chat/edit, but multi-file agent loops are happier with an agent/autofix style role if your continue version exposes it, and with a model that is known for tools. for openrouter i would not rely on a free 550b for tool_use. pin something like a paid deepseek/qwen coder/claude that actually returns tools reliably, and set provider prefs so it does not silently fallback to a non-tool provider.

4. continue vs roo/cline: continue is fine for chat + targeted edits. for "keep creating files until the feature is done" people usually have better luck with cline or roo pointed at the same openrouter key, or aider, because those clients are built around the tool loop. if you stay on continue, do smaller asks (one or two files per turn) and verify each tool call in the openrouter activity log.

so: new chat, smaller batches, and swap off the free nemotron for anything that has to call tools. the rate limit payload you pasted is basically saying your key itself is not the bottleneck.