I would like to offer someone the next openclaw: a GUI for the mac that allows people to manage and install local models with a single click, provides GUI tools for tweaking important aspects of them, and also provides a good command line interface to those models.
Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
381–390 of 809 posts
Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
#382I love my MacBook Pro M5 128GB RAM and I love qwen3.6. BUT DO NOT buy this MacBook if you plan on doing serious coding using local LLMs with it. The reason is simple: your fingers will burn and your head will explode from the noise. Running any kind of sophisticated job on the very laptop you are using is just not viable. Sure you can use it in clamshell mode, but forget touching it while working with AI coding or ag…
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Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd go for at least 32GB+. It'll fit in 24GB but leaves you little to no room for context, and that's at 4-bit quantization. If you want to run unquantized, you definitely need 128GB.
Nobody runs unquantized, there's literally no reason to. Q8 would be the largest anyone actually runs on consumer hardware for inference.
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Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
#384I love my MacBook Pro M5 128GB RAM and I love qwen3.6. BUT DO NOT buy this MacBook if you plan on doing serious coding using local LLMs with it. The reason is simple: your fingers will burn and your head will explode from the noise. Running any kind of sophisticated job on the very laptop you are using is just not viable. Sure you can use it in clamshell mode, but forget touching it while working with AI coding or ag…
Are you sure you're running it with MLX?
Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
#385Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’ll sell you a bundle, either a pair or a quartet so you can have 256 or 512GB over a 400GB/s network link I can’t figure out when it makes sense to pay 10k up front for a quantized Llama 3.1 but it’s an interesting option
You could fit a Q4 GLM5.2 in 512GB and still have some space for context (372-475GB for the model): https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/glm-5.2 But yeah, there's a bit of a dearth of models that could fully utilize memory in the 128-256GB bracket at the moment. But things move so fast in this space, I wouldn't base my decision on a generation of models that's just a few months old.
It depends on what's meant by "fully utilized" but fp8 quants of Nemotron 3 Super, the latest Minimax, Cohere A+ and the Mistral small and (especially) medium variants all sit in that 128-256 category, especially with full context or even moderate concurrency. In fact, in a 192GB environment I work with (Hopper GPUs, fwiw) I was pushed into using 4-bit quants with a couple of those to get the model working with a reasonable context window (..but 256 would have rocked out).
Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
#387None 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…
> Being able to nail a zero-shot greenfield project is relatively easy even for a small model Not really germane to your comment but I hope I don’t sound old when I say I remember a time when spinning up a PoC was a week of work, and a statement like yours was pure science fiction.
In what era spinning up a PoC required a week of work? Especially on the web. I've been a developer for roughly 20 years and that has never been the case, to the point that I believe people impressed by LLMs are the same who had a very low productivity. Today we have game jams as short as 3 days and talented people are able to produce very good PoC, with some almost complete!
Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
#388The open source models have gotten heavily conflated with local development. While that is cool and I'm excited about the future of local LLMs, it is not necessary to play around with these models. Without shilling for companies I don't have a relationship with, there are a number of companies who will give you an API just like Anthropic/OpenAI and you pay per token, albeit much cheaper than the frontier labs.
I've been using the full GLM 5.2 model this way (through opencode) at work for the past week. It's quite impressive.
Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
#389I feel like I'm going insane seeing people buy these 128gb MBP for thousands of dollars to run models that are objectively much worse than SOTA and spending so much more. The amount spent on a 128gb M5 MAX can buy you a damned new car here. What the hell am I missing? Are developers in other countries living in such different worlds? (I'm aware the price is, in absolute terms, more expensive where I live compared to…
I think it's silly to go for a laptop form factor. Last fall I put together a workstation with two second-hand 3090s in it (paid $850CDN each, now the best I can find is $1200). With 48GB VRAM it's reasonable - and I've been using Qwen 3.6 27B for various tasks around building KGs from text corpora / reasoning about them.
I've ran comparisons against everything that's available on OpenRouter (well, as of few weeks ago), and for $0/tok, the local 27B Qwen can't be beat. Sure, it's slower, and yeah, the office is a few degrees warmer than it ought to be -- but nobody can pull the plug, nobody is watching over my shoulder, and the results are on par with SOTA.
Can't wait for a similarly sized Qwen 3.7 - from what I've seen so far, it's a leap ahead of the previous version.
Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
#390I would like to offer someone the next openclaw: a GUI for the mac that allows people to manage and install local models with a single click, provides GUI tools for tweaking important aspects of them, and also provides a good command line interface to those models.
ollama is a good starting point