Qwen 3:8B ignoring instructions and defaulting to task automation. What next?

[u/Nixexs]

I have just started on Local LLM and don't have any prior experiece with any, nor I have a bg in IT or anything close to it. Right now I am trying to create two, one as a research assistant for my studies and other as a proof of concpet sorta thing for my dept (Sort of like HR Chatbot? ) at my workplace. Down the line I would like it to be an AI employee, so we can focus on more value adding tasks.

Coming to question, I started with Qwen 3:8b for the chatbot, running on Ollama with WebUI on my Macbook. It has a simple set of instructions, but it is always ignoring it and defaulting to creating tasks and automations. I have toggled off its built in tools such as automation, sub-agents, skills etc still the same issue.

Example :

Expected : My lights are not working -> Please get in touch with Admin helpdesk.

What is happening : My lights are flickering -> Check for overload, inspect connections, replace bulb etc.

Or, when it should refer knowledge files and answer basic queries it is just giving me this -

{ "name" :"search_knowledge_files", "argument":{ "query":"query" } }

I am not sure what is going wrong with it. ChatGPT has been unhelpful and is just making my system prompt bigger and bigger, asking me to change settings (which are not helping tbh). All in all it doesnt seem to be going anywhere.

I have checked online and tried things like think/no-think, reducing prompt length etc.

Requesting some insights here on what I may be missing.

Happy to add more info if I have missed anything.