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by ZeroCool2u10 hours ago |
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upvoteby UncleOxidant10 hours ago|
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Given how little claude usage they've been giving us on the "pro" plan lately, I've started doing more with the various open Qwen3.* models. Both Qwen3-coder-next and Qwen3.5-27b have been giving me good results and their 3.6 models are starting to be released. I think Anthropic may be shooting themselves in the foot here as more people start moving to local models due to costs and/or availability. Are the Qwen models as good as Claude right now? No. But they're getting close to as good as Claude sonnet was 9 months to a year ago (prior to 4.5, around 4.0). If I need some complex planning I save that for claude and have the Qwen models do the implementation.
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upvoteby blurbleblurble9 hours ago|
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I was thinking the exact same thing just now as I load up qwen3.6 into hermes agent and all while fantasizing that it will replace opus 4.7. It might not actually but seems like we're on the verge of that.

Lately I've been wondering too just how large these proprietary "ultra powerful frontier models" really are. It wouldn't shock me if the default models aren't actually just some kind of crazy MoE thing with only a very small number of active params but a huge pool of experts to draw from for world knowledge.

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upvoteby Aurornis9 hours ago|
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I've also been using the Qwen3.5-27B and the new Qwen3.6 locally, both at Q6. I don't agree that they're as good as pre-Opus Claude. I really like how much they can do on my local hardware, but we have a long way to go before we reach parity with even the pre-Opus Claude in my opinion.
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upvoteby wizee5 hours ago|
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I run Qwen 3.5 122B-A10B on my MacBook Pro, and in my experience its capability level for programming and code comprehension tasks is roughly that of Claude Sonnet 3.7. Honestly I find that pretty amazing, having something with capability roughly equivalent to frontier models of an year ago running locally on my laptop for free. I’m eager to try Qwen 3.6 122B-A10B when it’s released.
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upvoteby _fizz_buzz_6 hours ago|
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What hardware do you use? I want to experiment with running models locally.
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upvoteby threecheese6 hours ago|
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OP’s Qwen3.6 27B Q6 seems to run north of 20GB on huggingface, and should function on an Apple Silicon with 32GB RAM. Smaller models work unreasonably well even on my M1/64GB MacBook.

I am getting 10tok/sec on a 27B of Qwen3.5 (thinking, Q4, 18GB) on an M4/32GB Mac Mini. It’s slow.

For a 9B (much smaller, non-thinking) I am getting 30tok/sec, which is fast enough for regular use if you need something from the training data (like how to use grep or Hemingways favorite cocktail).

I’m using LMStudio, which is very easy and free (beer).

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upvoteby UncleOxidant6 hours ago|
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Not who you asked, but I've got a Framework desktop (strix halo) with 128GB RAM. In linux up to about 112GB can be allocated towards the GPU. I can run Qwen3.5-122B (4-bit quant) quite easily on this box. I find qwen3-coder-next (80b param, MOE) runs quite well at about 36tok/sec. Qwen3.5-27b is a bit slower at about ~24tok/sec but that's a dense model.
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upvoteby manmal8 hours ago|
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Why don’t you do the planning yourself? It’s very likely to be a better plan.
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upvoteby robot_jesus10 hours ago|
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They're not perfect but the local model game is progressing so quickly that they're impossible to ignore. I've only played around with the new qwen 3.6 models for a few minutes (it's damn impressive) but this weekend's project is to really put it through its paces.

If I can get the performance I'm seeing out of free models on a 6-year-old Macbook Pro M1, it's a sign of things to come.

Frontier models will have their place for 1) extensive integrations and tooling and 2) massive context windows. But I could see a very real local-first near future where a good portion of compute and inference is run locally and only goes to a frontier model as needed.

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upvoteby UncleOxidant10 hours ago|
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I've had really good results form qwen3-coder-next. I'm hoping we get a qwen3.6-coder soon since claude seems to get less-and-less available on the pro plan.
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upvoteby efficax9 hours ago|
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If the apple silicon keeps making the gains it makes, a mac studio with 128gb of ram + local models will be a practical all-local workflow by say 2028 or 2030. OpenAI and Anthropic are going to have to offer something really incredible if they want to keep subscription revenue from software developers in the near future, imo
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