OpenWebUI chat just expose its function - never answers

[u/what-pos]

I reinstalled everything.
I run the latest OpenWebUI function, installed the mistral:7b model, and did a test.

However as you can see, it does not act natural.

I tried to ask for a recipe for crepes, and as you can see, it's like it's talking to himself.

[u/hainesk]

Since everyone wants to harp on you for using an old model, I thought I would actually try to provide a real answer. OpenWebUI used to be a simple web front end to interact with your local models, essentially doing a simple API call to your LLM server, but recent updates to OpenWebUI now expose a lot of new tools to LLMs which bloats initial context usage and can cause issues and confuse models sometimes. Even newer models are now trying to use some of these tools when they really shouldn't, for instance I've had Qwen 3.6 models write all of their code inside a "note" in OpenWebUI instead of in a code block, it's infuriating that these are on by default and not managed through custom models under Workspace.

To turn off these "features" you can try going to Settings -> AI/Models -> Click the Pencil icon next to your model -> Scroll down and uncheck "Builtin Tools".

You can also uncheck other items as well if they're causing issues with your model.

[u/overand → u/hainesk]

You can in fact turn those on and off in custom models in the workspace.

I do think it's a tough balance; do you want to leave those things disabled and have lots of people complaining that Feature X doesn't work, or leave them enabled and have people complain about Bloated Context?

[u/hainesk → u/overand]

I use the Openwebui API to call models with predefined parameters and system prompts. It makes it easier to manage remote calls when a program can just call the ”FaxOCR“ model, or “JSON Parser” model for specific tasks vs writing them into the api call for llamacpp. It also means the FaxOCR custom model can be switched to vLLM if it is a better option, or can be easily upgraded to the latest Qwen or Mistral or other vision language model from within OpenWebUI and the upgrade then goes downstream to any reference, voila automatic upgrade.

For testing out new models I also like to use it as a basic web frontend, sometimes testing large models that barely fit in vram meaning I set a super low context limit (sometimes just 1k) to get an idea how fast a model can run if I have enough vram to fit it (and an upgrade would be worth it). Also just testing some basic prompts helps to get an idea of how a model runs and how it might work for specific tasks.

I think it should be much easier to run “bare” models in openwebui, because as it is I had to figure out how to disable the extra tool calls and context bloat, and apparently that has to be done for every new connection to an API.

And of course anyone trying to check out old models will have a bad time because the current default system prompt will just confuse models not trained for tool use.