I wonder if stuffing tool call formatting into an engram layer (see Deepseek's engram paper) that could be swapped at runtime would be a useful solution here.

The idea would be to encode tool calling semantics once on a single layer, and inject as-needed. Harness providers could then give users their bespoke tool calling layer that is injected at model load-time.

Dunno, seems like it might work. I think most open source models can have an engram layer injected (some testing would be required to see where the layer best fits).