LFM2.5-2.6B vs Recursive Flint

LFM2.5-2.6B

A small, fast cousin for tool calls, extraction and long-context steps on a laptop or phone. Liquid's own 4-bit build is 1.6 GB, and every common runtime runs it. It always thinks, isn't meant for coding or knowledge-heavy work, and organisations over $10M of revenue need another licence. There are no safety results or security contact.

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.

LFM2.5-2.6B

1. Quickest start is ollama run LiquidAI/lfm2.5-2.6b, 1.7 GB, or llama-cli -hf LiquidAI/LFM2.5-2.6B-GGUF
2. With vLLM or SGLang pass --tool-call-parser lfm2; for vLLM add --reasoning-parser qwen3 so the thinking comes back separately
3. Sample at temperature 0.1, top_k 50 and repetition_penalty 1.1, as the card and generation_config.json set
4. Put tools in the system prompt as List of tools: [...] JSON, or pass tools to apply_chat_template; calls come back as a Python list of function calls, and the system prompt can ask for JSON calls instead
5. Leave max_tokens unset or generous, since a low cap cuts the reasoning off mid-thought
6. Earlier thinking is dropped from the prompt unless preserve_thinking is true
7. Liquid's 328M LFM2.5-2.6B-DSpark drafter speeds decoding about 2.6 times in SGLang and on Apple silicon, per Liquid
8. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented

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