DOC:

Problem The documentation currently uses the direction=-1 argument when calling huggingface_hub.list_models() to retrieve the most downloaded model for a given task.

For example:

most_downloaded_model = next(
    iter(
        list_models(
            filter=task,
            sort="downloads",
            direction=-1
        )
    )
)

With the current version of huggingface_hub, HfApi.list_models() no longer accepts the direction argument. Running the example results in:

TypeError: HfApi.list_models() got an unexpected keyword argument 'direction'

This means users following the documentation directly may encounter an error even though the overall example is otherwise correct.

Location of the documentation

• Function/Class/Method name: huggingface_hub.list_models
• URL: https://huggingface.co/docs/smolagents/tutorials/tools

The outdated call appears in the example that creates a tool for retrieving the most downloaded model for a given Hugging Face task.

Suggested improvement Update the example to use the currently supported list_models() API.

For example:

most_downloaded_model = next(
    iter(
        list_models(
            filter=task,
            sort="downloads",
            limit=1
        )
    )
)

This removes the unsupported direction argument and uses limit=1, since the example only needs the first model from the results sorted by downloads.

Updating this example would prevent users from encountering a TypeError when following the documentation with recent versions of huggingface_hub.

Additional context (optional) I encountered this issue while following the smolagents documentation and creating the example tool locally.

The tool was called successfully by CodeAgent, but execution failed with:

TypeError: HfApi.list_models() got an unexpected keyword argument 'direction'

I also searched the existing issues. Some issues, such as #574, #250, and #748, include or reference the same older example, but I did not find an issue specifically addressing the incompatibility of the direction argument with the current huggingface_hub.list_models() API.

Checklist

• I have searched the existing issues and have not found a similar issue.
• I am willing to work on this issue and submit a pull request. (optional)