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Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

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Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

#71
post #20

None of the examples reflect 'real work', at least not what I'd consider real work. Being able to nail a zero-shot greenfield project is relatively easy even for a small model. There's not much context to build up and it can fall back to similar examples in the training data easily. So long as you're not asking it to invent something wholly new it'll probably manage. The real test is whether or not it can work with y…

In my experience, even with basic project concepts the small models struggle to spin up greenfield stuff. There's just too many decisions to be made and they're not good at that.

Modifying existing code is way easier if you don't expect it to be smart about it. Don't say "add X feature" and let it explore the codebase and build its own understanding. Point it at the relevant files and say "the goal is to add X feature to this code, follow Y guidelines". Now you've done the hardest part of making the decisions and it just has to follow instructions while coloring within the lines.

Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

#73

The article is based on running Qwen 3.6 on a 128GB MacBook Pro. For reference, a 128GB MBP currently starts at $6699 USD [0] Some people will be happy to pay that premium for privacy, but at roughly 10X the cost of a MacBook Neo, that money could also buy a lot of credits on OpenRouter or frontier labs. [0]: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-space...

I run Qwen 3.6 on my Framework Desktop 128GB, and it's very performant. I know Framework has had to raise the price since I preordered mine, but they're still well under half the cost of that Macbook.

I get ~55 Tok/s on my framework desktop with the 35B A3B q8 model, and so far am also very happy with the coding performance.

Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

#74

The article is based on running Qwen 3.6 on a 128GB MacBook Pro. For reference, a 128GB MBP currently starts at $6699 USD [0] Some people will be happy to pay that premium for privacy, but at roughly 10X the cost of a MacBook Neo, that money could also buy a lot of credits on OpenRouter or frontier labs. [0]: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-space...

Absolutely for the average developer the token speed is just going to be too slow for it to be workable. I think we’re looking at 2028 when memory becomes cheaper again and they’ll be a lot more people using local models.

Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

#76

The article is based on running Qwen 3.6 on a 128GB MacBook Pro. For reference, a 128GB MBP currently starts at $6699 USD [0] Some people will be happy to pay that premium for privacy, but at roughly 10X the cost of a MacBook Neo, that money could also buy a lot of credits on OpenRouter or frontier labs. [0]: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-space...

But you have to factor in that this device will last you 5-10 years. That said, I wouldn't spend almost $7k USD on this macbook lol.

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Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

#77
post #56

The article is based on running Qwen 3.6 on a 128GB MacBook Pro. For reference, a 128GB MBP currently starts at $6699 USD [0] Some people will be happy to pay that premium for privacy, but at roughly 10X the cost of a MacBook Neo, that money could also buy a lot of credits on OpenRouter or frontier labs. [0]: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-space...

I’m running the same model on a 48GB MBP with a q4 quant and it’s pretty decent. You definitely don’t 128GB. That’s the scale for 70B models at q8 or something.

How much does one of those cost in the US? Here in Brazil, your notebook is worth as much as a used Honda Fit, which seems absolutely insane. For comparison, the ThinkPad I'm currently running cost me 1/20 of how much this MBP costs here, leaving me with over $8.000 to spend with LLM inference (if I actually spent money with that).

Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

#78

> ... on my Macbook Max M5 128 GB Local development for who ? How many of y'all are rocking 128GB of memory? Am I reading Apple's site correctly that it's a $10,000 laptop?

Think commercial. My company invested in a local rig since privacy is important to our customers and sometimes I want to use these models on private data.

Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

#79

The article is based on running Qwen 3.6 on a 128GB MacBook Pro. For reference, a 128GB MBP currently starts at $6699 USD [0] Some people will be happy to pay that premium for privacy, but at roughly 10X the cost of a MacBook Neo, that money could also buy a lot of credits on OpenRouter or frontier labs. [0]: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-space...

> The article is based on running Qwen 3.6 on a 128GB MacBook Pro. For reference, a 128GB MBP currently starts at $6699 USD [0]

Qwen3.6-27B would be faster on a 3090 that costs around $1000-1200 though so I don't think it's a good counter-argument.

Op just happened to have that MacBook, but it doesn't mean it's necessary to run the model.

Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

#80
I've been working with local models for the past year. There's so many possibilities, but I don't think coding is one. Coding requires so many layers beyond inference; I spent so much time trying to replicate what Claude Code does end to end locally. Understanding all the layers and keeping up with the advancements feels like a slog. Even this article messes up and misunderstands what some of the settings are doing. Qwen in particular seems to work at first, then often gets stuck in thought loops when used for actual work.

However, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and non-code LLM use cases are so useful to have local, and don't require big hardware.

Having a universal reliable inference engine interface, I think, is the big unlock that needs to happen before app devs can ship these features.

Personal concrete use case: meeting recording app. This uses Parakeet + Qwen to create local transcriptions and post-cleanup, respectively.

Right now this app has to download and manage all these models, then bundle an inference engine to run them. It's a lot of code that probably should belong to the OS, or at least a standard interface.

While apps can offload some of this to llama.cpp or a similar process over http, that's another set of setup for the user to do before they can have a useful app.

Anyway, if you're getting started on a Mac, I'd suggest trying out oMLX (https://github.com/jundot/omlx) before messing with llama.cpp. In particular they have community benchmarks so you can see what kind of performance you're likely to get: https://omlx.ai/benchmarks. I wished each one had more configuration details though.

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