2. 3.6 is noticeably better than 3.5 for agentic uses (I have yet to use the dense model). The downside is that there’s so little personality, you’ll find more entertainment talking to a wall. Anything for creative use like writing or talking, I use Gemma 4. I also use Gemma 4 as a “chat” bot only, no agents. One amazing thing about the Gemma models is the vision capabilities. I was able to pipe in some handwritten notes and it converted into markdown flawlessly. But my handwriting is much better than the typical engineer’s chicken scratch.
Or if you want to put it differently, if your prompt is super clear about the actions you want it to do, is it following it exactly as you said or going off the rails occasionally