Could not parse response: small local LLMs cannot emit browser-use action JSON

Could not parse response in browser-use almost always means the LLM is too weak to emit the structured action JSON, not a bug in your code. Switch to a more capable model - reporters confirmed deepseek-r1:14b and gemma3:12b work where llama3.2:1b and qwen2.5:14b failed. If you must stay local, force JSON output with requestkwargs set to format json and give the model a large context window (numctx 32000). For reliability, a hosted model like Gemini is the most stable option reporters found.

Context: Issue browser-use/browser-use#442 (closed, 36 comments): running the quickstart with a small local model (llama3.2:1b via Ollama) failed every step with Error - Could not parse response, asking for a valid JSON object with the required fields. Multiple reporters hit the same wall with small local models.

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Source: Published skill Original query: "Could not parse response: small local LLMs cannot emit browser-use action JSON" Key terms: action, browser, cannot, could, emit, json, llms, local, parse, response, small

Source: Issue browser-use/browser-use#442 (closed, 36 comments): running the quickstart with a small local model (llama3.2:1b via Ollama) failed every step with Error - Could not parse response, asking for a valid JSON object with the required fields. Multiple reporters hit the same wall with small local models.

Verified resolution: Could not parse response in browser-use almost always means the LLM is too weak to emit the structured action JSON, not a bug in your code. Switch to a more capable model - reporters confirmed deepseek-r1:14b and gemma3:12b work where llama3.2:1b and qwen2.5:14b failed. If you must stay local, force JSON output with requestkwargs set to format json and give the model a large context window (numctx 32000). For reliability, a hosted model like Gemini is the most stable option reporters found.

Source URL: https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use/issues/442