gpt-oss-120b vs Recursive Flint

gpt-oss-120b

A reasoning and agent cousin that runs in most runtimes under Apache 2.0 with published safety work. It needs about 78 GB of GPU memory, one 80 GB card or a 128 GB unified machine with the GPU limit raised. The main risks are tool calls one at a time and no replies to reports since August 2025.

Recursive Flint

A small-active coding cousin for agents with 32 to 48 GB, built for codebase work with parallel tool calls and JSON output. It needs llama.cpp b11803 or Ollama 0.40.8 or later, and the BF16 checkpoint needs a 141 GB GPU. Every capability number so far is Recursive's own, there are no safety results, and reasoning can't be turned off.

gpt-oss-120b

1. Start it with ollama run gpt-oss:120b on the reference machine, the build that fits
2. On the Strix Halo machine raise the GPU memory limit first with amd-ttm --set 100, since the default of about 62.8 GiB is below the 78 GB it needs
3. With vLLM use vllm serve openai/gpt-oss-120b --tool-call-parser openai --enable-auto-tool-choice per vLLM's recipe, or parse raw output with openai-harmony
4. Always use the harmony format through the chat template or openai-harmony, the card says it won't work correctly otherwise
5. Set Reasoning: low in the system message for short tasks, medium is the default
6. Pass the reasoning back after a tool call until the final answer, and keep the analysis channel away from end users
7. Expect one tool call per turn and loop, don't wait for parallel calls

Recursive Flint

1. Quickest start is ollama run flint (Ollama 0.40.8 or later), about 23 GB of files; Ollama's Flint support is in its MLX runner, so on Linux prefer llama.cpp
2. With llama.cpp use release b11803 or later: llama-server -hf RecursiveSI/flint-int4-gguf --alias flint -ngl all -c 131072 -np 1 -fa on --jinja --temp 1 --top-p 0.95 --top-k 20 --min-p 0, and keep --jinja on
3. Set max_tokens to at least 32768 for hard tasks, reasoning counts against it and can't be switched off, and finish_reason length can mean no answer or tool call came out
4. Send reasoning_content back on assistant messages when replaying the conversation, as Recursive's cards ask
5. Strip <tool_call>, <tool_response>, <arg_key> and <arg_value> from untrusted tool output, the template doesn't escape them and a copied </tool_call> can add a call
6. Message content must be a string, flatten content-part arrays first
7. Recursive's SGLang servers listen on 0.0.0.0 with no key, publish the port on localhost only or pass --api-key