Thank you for saying this out loud. I've been losing my mind wondering where the discussion on this was. LLMs without Tool Use/Function Calling is basically a non starter for anything I want to do.
When I was working with LLMs without function calling I made the scaffold put some information in the system prompt that tells it some JSON-ish syntax it can use to invoke function calls.
It places more of a "mental burden" on the model to output tool calls in your custom format, but it worked enough to be useful.
It places more of a "mental burden" on the model to output tool calls in your custom format, but it worked enough to be useful.