Comment by dofm
2 days ago
I was quite impressed by Muse Glimmer, and while I am sure people will observe that it is less good on benchmarks, my first experiences with this new 27B have been somewhat exasperating, whereas testing Muse Glimmer was rather fun. I have not tested either in an agentic context, mind you.
Yeah, Glimmer is excellent. You don't really test Glimmer with one-shots, because it's explicitly designed for multi-turn solution finding. The way I see it, if I've got a task that could be done either agentic or requires a lot of context (for example, dumping 600KB of API documentation and another 300KB of codebase for a project) then I would reach for Glimmer easy and it seems like it could get there most of the time.
Qwen might be useful to bring out for a second opinion on some more focused details that are largely information complete. Like, use Glimmer to bring together all the relevant critical data and evaluate what the actual problems are, then maybe prototype a solution. If it's still acting up, maybe throw the resulting context at Qwen and let it meditate on it.
I think there was some study done where ideally you would want to throw a bunch of different models at a problem since they don't all have the same perspective or diagnosis on what the problems or the solutions are.
That is exactly how this model has worked for me so far. Muse on a one-shot task will get to 80%. And if you even nudge it and say, "Hey, finish up," or "Review the syntax," boom, it's done. And I'm getting 20 t/s with Ollama on a MacBook M5 Pro with 48GB of RAM. It is a seriously impressive little model.
Glimmer works really well as an "explore" agent model (like in Opencode.) It seems to be extremely efficient at searching and collating that info, and executing commands.
From my testing so far, Qwen 3.8 is better at code but it tends to meander and take forever if it has to look in a lot of places. Glimmer will use like ~1k tokens to formulate a plan and Qwen 3.8 will routinely go over 10k
Have you tried turning down the new Qwen's reasoning effort level from xhigh, which it defaults at?
LM Studio isn't exposing a dropdown for this, at least with the unsloth build.
Unsloth Studio / Desktop does.
These templates actually fix the effort selection for LM Studio/3.8
https://huggingface.co/froggeric/Qwen-Fixed-Chat-Templates
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I wouldn't find glimmer interesting except that it has much less memory usage per token of KV than Qwen. So I can get 24x concurrent glimmer on 2xRTXA6000 (with 128k context) where I can only get 6 Qwen 27b. This means I can get something like 4x the aggregate tokens/s out of glimmer.
For some usages that speedup more than makes up for it being inferior to Qwen intelligence wise.
Glimmer is fun because it's fast, tight, and doesn't wander or waffle. My favourite local model so far.