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Local Qwen isn't a worse Opus, it's a different tool

blog.alexellis.io

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Re: Local Qwen isn't a worse Opus, it's a different tool

#21

Post by pmontra »

usernomdeguerre wrote: post #3
gpt5 wrote: post #2

This article is a good summary of local models. Unlike the way they are hyped sometimes, as fantastic tools for coding and agentic local work. The reality is that they are rather limited, would not do well on a long or complex task, and are prone to fall into loops, forget their tasks, etc. Not mentioned in the article is that they are also rather expensive - not just for the hardware cost, but also electricity. Thes…

I believe that local models are a necessary extension of the personal computer and I imagine that one could have had similar criticisms of early personal computers.

Of course the early MSDOS PCs where loud and power hungry. I can't remember the specs but according to Wikipedia the IBM PC with a 80286 had a 192 Watt power supply. I don't remember if by then we had internal hard disks or we still had to buy a case as large as the one of the PC with a 10 or 20 MB disk inside. It was handy to raise the monitor further up.

Re: Local Qwen isn't a worse Opus, it's a different tool

#22

Post by askvictor »

cptskippy wrote: post #4

I've been running qwen3-5-9b-q4-k-m and qwen3-6-27b-q6-k simultaneously on an Intel Arc Pro B70 with a lot of success. https://github.com/cptskippy/battlemage-llm-gateway Opencode has been a huge productivity accelerator. I have two Hermes agents that I'm training to support my workflow with pretty good success. One is a personal assistant who manages my backlog and keeps me on task, follows up with me on items, and…

Does Intel make decent GPUs now? I must be out of the loop...

Re: Local Qwen isn't a worse Opus, it's a different tool

#23

Post by Natalia724 »

Ritewut wrote: post #20
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the value running the smaller model too? Why not just the big model for everything? I note both are dense, as well.

Tokens per second. The difference between 8B and something like 16B is not as big as you might think in practical usage and 8B is a lot faster and interactive than 16B but there are certain things where it is useful to farm it out to the large model.

Agree. For local coding help, latency often matters more than raw benchmark quality. A slightly weaker model that answers immediately changes how often you reach for it.

Re: Local Qwen isn't a worse Opus, it's a different tool

#25

Post by marak830 »

sanderjd wrote: post #15
zmmmmm wrote: post #9

That's a great write up. The one thing I feel it seems to under estimate is the likelihood of improvement. Even the authors acknowledge it's not even worth comparing local models from a year ago to what we have now. In fact, people widely see Opus 4.5 in November last year - 8 months ago - as the first time agentic coding became viable broadly viable even with frontier hosted models. So why would we lock in hard on a…

Right. Opus 4.5 8 months ago, good enough for agentic coding. How far behind that are open weight models? More than 8 months? But how much more? When will they reach Opus 4.5 level? A few months from now? A year from now? Never?

GLM 5.2 came out today and the early reports have been quite good. Very difficult to run except on prosumer hardware, but small business could quite easily (or something like open router).

Re: Local Qwen isn't a worse Opus, it's a different tool

#27

Post by neonstatic »

hypfer wrote: post #7

That was a lot of text for me still having no idea what the point of the author was (beside what I can infer from the headline that is). I do however now know that they're a totally cool dude building stuff physically and as software + that other people give them money for it. Does that have anything to do with the topic suggested by the headline? Not sure.

Everything is an ad these days. The article was not useless, but for the information it provides, it could have been two paragraphs.

Re: Local Qwen isn't a worse Opus, it's a different tool

#28

Post by hypfer »

neonstatic wrote: post #27
hypfer wrote: post #7

That was a lot of text for me still having no idea what the point of the author was (beside what I can infer from the headline that is). I do however now know that they're a totally cool dude building stuff physically and as software + that other people give them money for it. Does that have anything to do with the topic suggested by the headline? Not sure.

Everything is an ad these days. The article was not useless, but for the information it provides, it could have been two paragraphs.

FWIW it told me stuff about openfaas. Now I know how to mentally file it and how to mentally file the author. The GitHub profile alone might not have sent the same signal, so this is useful.

Is it bad software? Idk. Probably not.

Should you treat it as a grassroots Foss thing maintained by fellow sane hackers? No sir.

Re: Local Qwen isn't a worse Opus, it's a different tool

#29

Post by dv35z »

stingraycharles wrote: post #10
glerk wrote: post #6

If you play with these models long enough, you realize there is more to them than just "model X is smarter than model Y" or "model Y is cheaper than model Z". They are different tools and the prompting technique is different. It is very much like playing an instrument. With Claude, you sometimes want to under-specify or phrase things more indirectly to give a color to the implementation or elicit something creative.…

I agree with your general gist, and in general it’s a “the best tool for the particular job”, keeping token spent and other things in mind as well. What I do know absolutely for sure is that LLM benchmarks are not to be trusted, they are just a minor indicator and real world usage is often very different.

What would it take to have trustworthy benchmarks? As with all "targets", they can be gamed - but I am curious about quantifiable quality metrics.

Re: Local Qwen isn't a worse Opus, it's a different tool

#30

Post by hashmap »

glerk wrote: post #6

If you play with these models long enough, you realize there is more to them than just "model X is smarter than model Y" or "model Y is cheaper than model Z". They are different tools and the prompting technique is different. It is very much like playing an instrument. With Claude, you sometimes want to under-specify or phrase things more indirectly to give a color to the implementation or elicit something creative.…

totally true. one key for claude is to not smell like an evaluator, its good at knowing when its being tested and will behave defensively and avoid doing work. i avoid this basin by typing unreasonably excited about the thing i want done. like way over the top. it's harder to keep that up than it sounds.
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