You’re right, Gemma isn’t the best model for coding (afaik more "everyday tasks" related). My first idea was to use Qwen, but its architecture was much more complex to implement in this stack. I chose Gemma so I wouldn’t spend all my time debugging custom kernels and could actually move the project forward with simpler approach
replyIn defense of this model, Gemma is actually a very good general-purpose model that can work with multiple languages. I use it for spam classification and for processing dictation, which means that I hold the entire model in memory all of the time, which is somewhat problematic (64GB RAM total, but heavy usage by docker, databases, etc)
replyGemma is a great reference model and it’s easy to work with. Once you have Gemma working well, then do the extra work to use Qwen as well.
replyI am using Gemma for a few tasks simply because it’s “good enough”.
Gemma 4's tool calling was recently fixed; that was the main issue with agentic use in my experience.
replyOtherwise IMO it codes about as well as the Qwen MoE for PHP and SQL. It's a fully impressive model (though it is not as mindbendingly impressive as the 12B, which is outrageously good for its footprint)