This link [1] features some good insight on how to adapt your usage to smaller models which require more explicit or deliberate prompting. I have been using Gemma 4 31B a lot and have found it very competent. It can be a bit unstable and start spiraling or end up in infinite loops that you need to reset, but for the most part it's been really good.

[1]: https://itayinbarr.substack.com/p/honey-i-shrunk-the-coding-...

Yeah. Context size matters a lot. With OpenCode dumping like 10k tokens in the system prompt it takes like 4 rounds before it had to compact at say 64k. It's not really worth it to run at anything below 100k and even then the models aren't all that useful.

They're also pretty terrible at summarization. Pretty much always some file read or write in the middle of the task would cross the context margin and it would mark it as completed in the summary. I think leaving the first prompt as well as the last few turns intact would improve this issue quite a lot, but at low context sizes thats pretty much the whole context ...

You're not sharing what quantization you're using, in my experience, anything below Q8 and less than ~30B tends to basically be useless locally, at least for what you typically use codex et al for, I'm sure it works for very simple prompts.

But as soon as you go below Q8, the models get stuck in repeating loops, get the tool calling syntax wrong or just starts outputting gibberish after a short while.

I can see that and I don't know your setup, but there are people pushing >70t/s with MTP on a single 3090, with big contexts still >50t/s. 64k is not a lot for agentic coding, and IIRC 128k with turboquant and the likes should be possible for you. r/LocalLLM/ and r/LocalLLaMA/ are worth a visit IMO.

EDIT: just found this recipe repo, may wanna give it a go: https://github.com/noonghunna/club-3090

EDIT-2: this can also shave off a lot of context need for tool calling -> https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk

I see your updated post. Switch over to llamacpp and look up recommended quants and settings. A good place for this info is on /r/localllama

Qwen3.6 supports 266k context out of the box. Try using q8 kv cache to enable more of it.

I agree for planning it's not there yet. But I wouldn't be surprised if something came out that was in a similar weight class.

Try oh-my-openagent plan mode.