Comment by cogman10
4 hours ago
They are actually quite a bit better than you might think. Qwen3.6 27B is pretty capable at coding.
For non-coding work, they are more than good enough. A lot of the ways my non-technical family members have interacted with AI would be perfectly served by using a local model.
After all, people were more than satisfied with the results from GPT 3. That has long since been surpassed by open weight models.
I'm sure there are things local models are good enough at in non-coding work, but for anything complex I do not find this to be the case.
I'd say local models are fairly capable of even somewhat complex coding execution. For complex non-coding work (research, in-depth analysis, assembly of complex info-dense documents) I'd rather do it by hand than switch from Opus 4.7 to anything I could even theoretically run locally.
I don't know what kind of coding, but for my case it's been useless. Not working code almost every time. It's much quicker to just write it by hand than use that model.
I've been experimenting with Qwen3 Coder Next and Copilot for a little Rust toy project and it's been trucking along. It does require a fair bit of hand-holding (or perhaps I just don't trust it to give it larger tasks), but it works alright.
Give 3.5 or 3.6 a shot. 3.5 has smaller models that you could leverage. If you can swing it, though, 3.6 27B is quite good.