I believe there's a comment below mentioning "qwen" but not a specific version number - if you're looking for 3rd party validation. I've personally tried qwen3.6-35b-a3b, qwen3.5-35b-a3b, and qwen3.5-27b with forge (agentic coding harness built on forge workflowrunner) and it works great. Official forge eval benchmarks for that class of models is still a couple of weeks out.

Proxy mode should work fine with remote models, the only constraint is the compatible endpoint - which is standard anyways. I don't think you'd have any issue hitting either a remote gateway like liteLLM or just claude API.