Comment by twothreeone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by twothreeone | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> unsloth/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-MTP-GGUF

I've actually tried this exact same model locally as well.. albeit on just a single 3090 at 128k context and I got around 40-60tok/s with Q4_K quantization.

The thing that bugged me the most was really the quality of the output on moderately complex real-world coding tasks. Having to switch between "prompt/vibe" and "manually implement" is such a big context switch burden, because you really have to ask yourself every few minutes if you're "holding it wrong" or the model is just too stupid.

It also doesn't really seem to handle transitions from "low-level implementation detail" to "high-level design" well, e.g., it wouldn't easily render tables and such. With Claude I don't have this issue.. so I think for now my verdict would be that it's not really a viable replacement. I really hope it will be in a few months time.

Oh and I used "aider" to replace claude CLI, which maybe that's also sub-optimal.. I'm not sure. The MCP marketplaces are useful of course, though arguably you could just manually replace them over time.

I don't generally switch to implementing myself on the model, although there are definitely times where I stop it and correct it mid-task.

It's prone to thinking longer and more repetitively, again - it's definitely not opus 4.7/4.8.

I've been using pi.dev as my harness for it, and been pleasantly surprised by how nice it feels (I have used aider, but only very briefly and quite a while back - so I can't realistically compare).

I would say it's roughly where I felt claude was a year back - Most of the sessions need to be more "pair programming" and less "I let it run for hours".

I'm a big fan of frequent "human in the loop" style workflows even when I'm on something like opus at work, though. I have opinions about lots of things, and re-inforcing that the model should stop and ask frequently seems to get me considerably better output, without having to "re-roll" if you will.

I've done a good bit of management, and I think it's roughly producing what a junior dev might produce in a day every 5 minutes. And just like a junior dev, you need to be steering it back on track fairly often.

Opus feels more like a mid-level at this point. I can hand it a chunk of work and "leave" but I still get better output if I'm checked-in and watching/steering.

I'm so out of the loop on this stuff, it's the first time in my IT career I feel really behind on things.

I've used Claude Opus to quickly and effectively pound out some 100-200 line scripts that integrate with a vendor's API, and it one-shotted them both almost perfectly.

I wonder if for a lot of these local models, the scope of the AI assistance should simply be smaller: You architect the tools and the function definitions, and then tell AI to implement one at a time? Does anyone do that rigorously?

100-200 like scripts are tiny especially for something easy to scope like a vendor api. Give opus a much, much larger challenge and see what you get back. You really don’t need to see the code much at all anymore except for some steering now and then.

See, that makes it sound better in my world: I'm doing all 'manually implement' all the time, and have no interest in becoming the ten millionth manager to hit the software dev landscape. It boggles my mind that people think this is a win.

I regularly use a pocket calculator: either a physical one, or Apple's Calculator app if I want more decimal places. 'Too stupid' isn't a thing for me if it can cough up some math that would be inconvenient for me to work out by hand. tok/s also isn't a concern because I'm not expecting more than I can read. My ideal scenario would be occasional diversions into querying a 'coding calculator' that can give examples along the lines I want, my way.

I'll make a mental note that Qwen shows signs of being the kind of calculator I'd use for a specific task. Context switching isn't a burden if you're not looking to switch over to vibe/manage and stay there.

The things is: it does _feel_ like you're moving faster when Claude is in the zone and does what it's supposed to. You're essentially flying a plane on auto pilot, occasionally telling it to slightly adjust course. Only that now you can fly 10 planes in parallel, all to different destinations.

Is it _objectively_ more productive? I doubt there's a clear-cut answer in the long run (my main suspicion is that since you're essentially creating 10x unnecessary complexity, you'll likely never recover from all the cruft and maintenance kills you in the end - maybe people will find solutions for that though).

aider sucks tbh... you should invest time in learning how to customise pi. every other harness is crap and hype.

Thanks! yeah, maybe I'll try to look at that next..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com