Hmm, i used it and it can't get past a simple coding test that 5.5 passes with light reasoning
Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
561–570 of 809 posts
Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
#562I 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
#563I see a lot of people writing about how expensive the hardware to run these local models is - but see no mentions of the Intel Arc Pro B50/B60/B70 which seem like decent value if you're not interested in Apple kit (as much as anything can be decent value in the current status quo). I just got a B70 with 32GB RAM for the equivalent of $1200 (incl. sales tax and import duties to my non-US location, so presumably it cou…
Interesting that Intels latest consumer GPUs only have 10 and 12GB respectively for the B570 and B580.
Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
#564I 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…
If your workflow benefits from the speed it quickly pays for itself when factoring in developer salaries here in the US. I recently switched companies and they bought me an M5 Max 128GB as my dev machine.
Builds and local test runs are 3 times faster than the Windows laptop option. The machine will pay for itself just based on that within 3 months. I can spin up a local kubernetes cluster and do full integration tests while I am working on other things as well.
It isn’t a strictly Mac vs Windows thing though. It looks like the culprit is the MDM software on the Windows machines is just crazy slow and constantly getting in the way.
If I was paid less it would definitely make less sense for the company to pay for this machine.
Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is because they use a different tool calling format than most other models. Unsloth quants fix this in their Gemma releases.
Can you say a bit more about this? The bad tool calling has made me give up on using Gemma for my Hermes and a personal recipe site. I have only downloaded from Ollama.
Ollama is not recommended [0], use llama.cpp or more specifically Unsloth Studio which wraps llama.cpp and which has an API mode you can use to hook into Hermes or another agent. Unsloth make both the Studio and the quants which fix various issues with many models [1] as well as implementing new features like MTP and QAT support much sooner than other teams. In general you should read r/LocalLLaMa as it has a lot of updates regarding local models as the field moves fast.
Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
#566I 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…
You can get some work done by using low power mode even when plugged in, and making your fan start running when the temps just start to rise (maybe 40 degrees. Use a third party fan app to set it up
Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
#567The 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...
You can also run Qwen 3.6 27B dense model on DGX Spark with comparable performance [1][2] for about $4000 (Asus Ascent GX10 is $3999 at various retailers). In theory you can also get 48GB of VRAM with, say, two 3090s, but it will take up a lot of space and generate a lot of heat compared to the Macbook Pro and GB10. [1] https://x.com/MiaAI_lab/status/2070859135399182444 [2] https://github.com/MiaAI-Lab/Qwen3.6-27B-NV…
Alternatively you could run it on Strix Halo for $1,000 less, and while it may be slightly slower you won't have to deal with NVIDIA's shit on Linux and worrying about having to use their custom kernels or Ubuntu.
Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly your best bet is to buy a $20 Claude subscription, ask Claude to set it all up with Pi and llama.cpp and come back in 20 minutes after a cup of coffee. This is also a good idea because it will help set expectations of what a local model can do vs. a frontier model.
This is what I did after struggling to get llama.cpp working at a decent speed on my M1 Macbook. The secret is to very specific with your needs and targeted in what you are using llama.cpp for. Mine setup is just about strictly for qwen3-coder and now, I get a fairly decent speed out of it. I also installed Cursor to check Claude and it all worked out well.
Are you talking about Qwen3 Coder 30b a3b Instruct from August 2025, which is a non-reasoning model? Or the more recent "Qwen3 Coder Next" from Feb this year with 80b params, 3b active? I found Qwen3 coder next to be quite good on openrouter [1], but couldn't run it locally.
Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
#569Has anyone considered a home server? Assuming mobility is not important if we pick components to match a similar hardware would it be more value for money?
Generally speaking a home server/workstation set up is going to provide better performance at lower cost. You don't sacrifice much mobility either so long as you have an internet connection and can either SSH tunnel or use Tailscale (never used, just know it's popular).
Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
#570I 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…
>Sure you can use it in clamshell mode
Wouldn't this damage the MBP display?
My RTX laptop has air intake underneath the keyboard and clamshell mode is surely a recipe for disaster; I've taken numerous measures to ensure that the laptop doesn't stay awake when the lid is down.