I've been building a harness for qwen3.5:9b lately (to better understand how to create agentic tools/have fun) and I'm not going to use it instead of Opus 4.6 for my day job but it's remarkably useful for small tasks. And more than snappy enough on my equipment. It's a fun model to experiment with. I was previously using an old model from Meta and the contrast in capability is pretty crazy.

I like the idea of finding practical uses for it, but so far haven't managed to be creative enough. I'm so accustomed to using these things for programming.

What kind of small tasks do you find it's good at? My non-coding use of agents has been related to server admin, and my local-llm use-case is for 24/7 tasks that would be cost-prohibitive. So my best guess for this would be monitoring logs, security cameras, and general home automation tasks.