You can run Qwen3.5-35B-A3B on 32GB of RAM sure, although to get 'Claude Code' performance, which I assume he means Sonnet or Opus level models in 2026, this will likely be a few years away before its runnable locally (with reasonable hardware).

I fully agree, I run that one with Q4 on my MBP, and the performance (including quality of response) is a let down.

I am wondering how people rave so much about local "small devices" LLM vs what codex or Claude code are capable of.

Sadly there are too much hype on local LLM, they look great for 5min tests and that's it.