I've tried a few models and some are decent, including Qwens models. I've tried a few harnesses like Roo Code in VSCode to put things together that in theory emulate the experience I get from VSCode + Claude or Copilot, but I generally find the experience extremely limited and frustrating.

How have you set things up to have a good experience?

I'm using the qwen cli tool with a duckduckgo search skill that I made Claude write. It's like bootstrapping I guess

Once it can search for factual information online the smaller model size becomes less noticeable