https://gist.github.com/neomantra/d49df05d6b137b9e6844186499...
I started playing with local LLM+MCP in April 2025... I had to beg Qwen to look at the tool list and try anything.
These ds4 models, will happily call tools and all those harnesses I've made are composed of custom tools.
Once the HuggingFace+OpenAI showed how powerful notes are, I added a scratchpad tool to ds4go to improve self-improvement.
While you can do 64G/96G with the Qwen3.8 model, realistically you need 128G. Also, despite tons of playing with local models, the cloud-hosted models on bigger iron are smarter and faster. I don't truly code with my local models and don't recommend this path right now to replace something like Opus/Astra or full-brain DeepSeek4.
The "frontier-ness" of ds4 is great though! It has vast knowledge and thinking capability. Look at that steering video especially. I'm now exploring using ds4 for high-level thinking to create prompts for denser coding models.