Posted by simonw 8 hours ago
I am trying super hard to use cheap models, and outside SOTA models, they have been more trouble than they are worth.
I really recommend trying the Qwen models - 3 coder next is really incredible. GLM 4.7 flash is also incredibly performant on modest hardware. Important things to consider is setting the temperature and top_p and top_k values etc based on what is recommended by the provider of the model - a thing as simple as that could result in a huge difference in performance.
The other big leap for me was switching to Zed editor and getting its agent stuff just seamlessly integrated. If you run LM Studio on your local machine it's super easy and even setting it up on a remote machine and calling out to LM Studio is dead simple.
Use case means everything. I doubt this model would fare well on a large codebase, but this thing is incredible.
Maybe Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is that model? This comment reports good results: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47249343#47249782
I need to put that through its paces.
So far none of them have be useful enough at first glance with a local model for me to stick with them and dig in further.
It has been useful for education ("What does this Elixir code do? <Paste file> ..... <general explanation> "then What this line mean?")
as well as getting a few basic tests written when I'm unfamiliar with the syntax. ("In Elixir Phoenix, given <subject under test, paste entire module file> and <test helper module, paste entire file> and <existing tests, pasted in, used both for context and as examples> , what is one additional test you would write?")
This is useful in that I get a single test I can review, run, paste in, and I'm not using any quota. Generally I have to fix it, but that's just a matter of reading the actual test and throwing the test failure output to the LLM to propose a fix. Some human judgement is required but once I got going adding a test took 10 minutes despite being relatively unfamiliar with Elixir Phoenix .
It's a nice loop, I'm in the loop, and I'm learning Elixir and contributing a useful feature that has tests.