ai-agents-tool-calling-compati-mistral-small-3-1-in-hf-format-fails-to-start-with-3d368524

THEN Avoid the built-in mistral tokenizer; instead provide a custom chat template via `--chat-template` that includes the proper Jinja2 template for Mistral tool calling. This bypasses the `MistralTokenizer` compatibility issue in vLLM v0.8.3/v0.8.4.

```jinja
{%- set today = strftime_now("%Y-%m-%d") %}
{%- set default_system_message = "You are Mistral Small 3..." %}
{{- bos_token }}
{%- if messages[0]['role'] == 'system' %}
    {%- if messages[0]['content'] is string %}
        {%- set system_message = messages[0]['content'] %}
...
```
(Full template available in the source issue.)