Yeah damn but they are heavy lol
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all
471–480 of 563 posts
Re: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all
#472I've been running this on my laptop with the Unsloth 20.9GB GGUF in LM Studio: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-GGUF/blob/mai... It drew a better pelican riding a bicycle than Opus 4.7 did! https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/16/qwen-beats-opus/
I've been running qwen3.6:35b-a3b-q4_K_M (22.3GB) via Ollama.
Is the 20.9GB GGUF version better or negligible in comparison?
Re: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all
#473I'm broadly curious how people are using these local models. Literally, how are they attaching harnesses to this and finding more value than just renting tokens from Anthropic of OpenAI?
Some tasks don’t require SOTA models. For translating small texts I use Gemma 4 on my iPhone because it’s faster and better than Apple Translate or Google Translate and works offline. Also if you can break down certain tasks like JSON healing into small focused coding tasks then local models are useful
Do you use E2B or E4B?
Re: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been largely using Qwen3.5-122b at 6 bit quant locally for some c++/go/python dev lately because it is quite capable as long as I can give it pretty specific asks within the codebase and it will produce code that needs minimal massaging to fit into the project. I do have a $20 claude sub I can fall back to for anything qwen struggles with, but with 3.5 I have been very pleased with the results.
How much VRAM do you need for that?
Not OP, but I ran 122b successfully with normal RAM offloading. You dont need all that much VRAM, which is super expensive. I used 96gb ram + 16gb vram gpu. But it's not very fast in that setup, maybe 15 token per second. Still, you can give it a task and come back later and its done. (Disclaimer: I build that PC before stuff got expensive)
Re: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
In where I am living, 10k USD is a little more than 3 years worth of rent, for a relatively new and convenient 2 bedroom apartment.
$277 a month for a two bedroom is literally 6-10% of what someone in the SF Bagholder Area pays. Either you're in Africa, southeast Asia or south/central Amarica. How do you even afford internet?
Yes, I am in SEA. Home internet here costs 10$ per month.
My point was: not every person browsing this site has high living standard, and the ability to spend 10k on computing is a privilege.
Re: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all
#476A relief to see the Qwen team still publishing open weights, after the kneecapping [1] and departures of Junyang Lin and others [2]! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47246746 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47249343
This is just one model in the Qwen 3.6 series. They will most likely release the other small sizes (not much sense in keeping them proprietary) and perhaps their 122A10B size also, but the flagship 397A17B size seems to have been excluded.
122b would be awesome. It is the largest size you can kinda run with a beefy consumer PC. I wondered about gemma stopping in the 30b category, it is already very strong. 122b might have been too close to being really useful.
Re: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all
#477I'm broadly curious how people are using these local models. Literally, how are they attaching harnesses to this and finding more value than just renting tokens from Anthropic of OpenAI?
Some tasks don’t require SOTA models. For translating small texts I use Gemma 4 on my iPhone because it’s faster and better than Apple Translate or Google Translate and works offline. Also if you can break down certain tasks like JSON healing into small focused coding tasks then local models are useful
How does that work? Wouldn't it be slow loading the weights into memory every time you launch it?
Re: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can (barely, but sustainably) run Q3.5 397B on my Mac Studio with 256GB unified. It cost $10,000 but that's well within reach for most people who are here, I expect.
$10k is well outside my budget for frivolous computer purchases.
Just have to reclassify it as non-frivolous then. $10k's not a lot for something as important as a car, if you live somewhere where one is required. Housing is typically gonna cost you more than $10k to own. I probably spend close to $10k for food for 1.5 years.
So if you just huff enough of the AI Kool aid, you too can own a Mac Studio. Or an M5 MacBook. Or a dual 3090 rig.
Re: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all
#479Re: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 397B model can be run at home with the weights stored on an SSD (or on 2 SSDs, for double throughput). Probably too slow for chat, but usable as a coding assistant.
I think you have that backwards. Agentic coding is way more demanding than simple chat. The request/response loops (tool calling) are much tighter and more numerous, and the context is waaaaay bigger in general.
In processing power, but chat is interactive. Agentic coding, you come up with a plan and sign off on it, and then just let it go for a while. It's the difference between speed and latency.