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 request_kwargs set to format json and give the model a large context window (num_ctx 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.