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Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

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Re: Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

#271
Huh, running the Q4_K_M quant with LM Studio, and asked it "How can I set up Qwen 3.6 27b to use tools and access the local file system?".

Part of its reply was: Quick clarification: As of early 2025, "Qwen 3.6" hasn't been released yet. You are likely looking for Qwen2.5, specifically the Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct model, which is the 30B-class model closest to your 27B reference. The instructions below will use this model.

Weird.

Re: Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one is around 250 t/s prefill and 12.4 generation in my testing.

similar numbers here - slightly higher PP. slightly better peak speed and retention w/ q8_0 kv cache quants too. llama-bench results here, cba to format for hn: https://pastebin.com/raw/zgJeqRbv GTR 9 Pro, "performance" profile in BIOS, GTT instead of GART, Fedora 44

If I did a proper benchmark I think the numbers would be what you got. Minimax M2.7 is also surprisingly not that slow, and in some ways faster as it seems to get things right with less thinking output. (around 140 t/s prefill and 23 t/s generation).

Re: Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

#273
post #271

Huh, running the Q4_K_M quant with LM Studio, and asked it "How can I set up Qwen 3.6 27b to use tools and access the local file system?". Part of its reply was: Quick clarification: As of early 2025, "Qwen 3.6" hasn't been released yet. You are likely looking for Qwen2.5, specifically the Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct model, which is the 30B-class model closest to your 27B reference. The instructions below will use this mode…

This is pretty standard in every model. Ask Opus or Gemini about 2026 (without a big system prompt to steer them) and they'll swear blind it's 2024/25 too.

Re: Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

#275
post #106

The pelican is excellent for a 16.8GB quantized local model: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/22/qwen36-27b/ I ran it on an M5 Pro with 128GB of RAM, but it only needs ~20GB of that. I expect it will run OK on a 32GB machine. Performance numbers: Reading: 20 tokens, 0.4s, 54.32 tokens/s Generation: 4,444 tokens, 2min 53s, 25.57 tokens/s I like it better than the pelican I got from Opus 4.7 the other day: https://si…

I feel like this time it is indeed in the training set, because it is too good to be true. Can you run your other tests and see the difference?

I think at this point we can safely put the pelican test in the category of Goodhart's law.

Re: Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

#276
post #106

The pelican is excellent for a 16.8GB quantized local model: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/22/qwen36-27b/ I ran it on an M5 Pro with 128GB of RAM, but it only needs ~20GB of that. I expect it will run OK on a 32GB machine. Performance numbers: Reading: 20 tokens, 0.4s, 54.32 tokens/s Generation: 4,444 tokens, 2min 53s, 25.57 tokens/s I like it better than the pelican I got from Opus 4.7 the other day: https://si…

I feel like this time it is indeed in the training set, because it is too good to be true. Can you run your other tests and see the difference?

If I were them I'd run such requests through a diffusion model, and then try to distill an SVG out of that.

Re: Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just assume any of those companies would steal my work and wouldn't care about it. Everything they have done so far indicates this. Running your own is the only option unless you really trust them or unless you have the option to sue them like some big companies can. Or if you don't really care then you can use the chineese one since it is cheaper. What makes you trust Anthropic more than Alibaba?

There’s a difference between stealing for model training and direct monitoring of actionable trade secrets and corporate espionage. Anthropic and OpenAI wouldn’t do this simply because they would be litigated out of existence and criminally investigated if they did. In China it’s an expected part of the corporate and legal structure with virtually no recourse for a foreign firm and when it’s in states interest domest…

Anthropic already admitted to heavily monitoring user requests to protect against distillation. They have everything in place, turning on learning from user data would literally be just a couple lines of code at this point. Anyone trusting them not to do it is a fool.

Re: Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

#278

I'm kind of interested in a setup where one buys local hardware specifically to run a crap ton of small-to-medium LLM locally 24/7 at high throughput. These models might now be smart enough to make all kinds of autonomous agent workflows viable at a cheap price, with a good queue prioritization system for queries to fully utilize the hardware.

I would love to have a shit load of small (27B dense. 35B MoE) agents running locally and looking at and ingesting every bit of data about me, my life and what I get up to see what sort of correlations it finds. Give a coding agent access to a data lake of events and let it build up its own analytics tooling to extract and draw out information from that data, and present it to me as daily/weekly/monthly summaries.

Re: Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

#279
So far I'm unimpressed for local inference. got 11 tokens per second on omlx on an M5 Pro with 128gb of ram, so it took an hour to write a few hundred lines of code that didn't work. Opus and Sonnet in CC the same task successfully in a matter of minutes. The 3.6:35b model seemed okay on ollama yesterday.

Need to check out other harnesses for this besides claude code, but the local models are just painfully slow.

Re: Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

#280

Since Gemma 4 came this easter the gap from self hosting models to Claude has decreased sigificantly I think. The gap is still huge it just that local models were extremely non-competitive before easter. So now it seems Qwen 3.6 is another bump up from Gemma 4 which is exciting if it is so. I keep an Opus close ofcourse, because these local models still wander off in the wrong direction and fails. Something Opus almo…

Gemma4 feels the most "claude-like" of all the models I've run locally on my M5 mbp.
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