I've been building a harness for qwen3.5:9b lately (to better understand how to create agentic tools/have fun) and I'm not going to use it instead of Opus 4.6 for my day job but it's remarkably useful for small tasks. And more than snappy enough on my equipment. It's a fun model to experiment with. I was previously using an old model from Meta and the contrast in capability is pretty crazy.

I like the idea of finding practical uses for it, but so far haven't managed to be creative enough. I'm so accustomed to using these things for programming.

You can really see the limitations of qwen3.5:9b in reasoning traces- it’s fascinating. When a question “goes bad”, sometimes the thinking tokens are WILD - it’s like watching the Poirot after a head injury.

Example: “what is the air speed velocity of a swallow?” - qwen knew it was a Monty Python gag, but couldnt and didnt figure out which one.

How much difference are you seeing between standard and Q4 versions in terms of degradation, and is it constant across tasks or more noticeable in some vs others?

How's it compare in quality with larger models in the same series? E.g 122b?

Correction: not thinking, not a creature.

If it was a creature I would feel some sorrow when I killed it.

If you are feeling sorrow when you reboot a machine running an LLM, get to a psychiatrist ASAP.