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Notes -
Run a competent LLM like Qwen 3.6 with a useful harness on your own computer. It's something else seeing it and seeing the machine that's doing it as a physical thing.
I was skeptical (as I'm a bit of a cloud AI maximalist), but, this comment was what encouraged me to give Qwen 3.6-27B with Pi a shot. (Or rather, I told Codex to install it, configure it, and give it a shot on my machine on my behalf, as I need to burn usage before my limit resets.)
It is much better than I expected and, given a proper iteration loop where it can inspect linter/compile failures, can generally stumble toward a working solution for simple and even moderate-complexity tasks. I went in expecting a gimmick; 27B seems woefully underpowered. But local models have apparently come a long way since StarCoder, which was the last time I seriously tested any open LLMs. With a custom planner/orchestrator harness to file down some of the rougher edges (I'd like to enforce smaller changes and more frequent feedback loops) I bet this would be genuinely usable.
Maybe we can escape the permanent underclass after all.
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