In the article the author describes what they made. It's definitely not bullshit, but it's also not as reliable or as handsfree as the 1t models.

For people who aren't completely vibe or agent coding these models are better than say copilot or the free models appearing after a Google search. Probably better than chatgpts flagships in some ways.

I mostly use 4b to 9b models for basic inquiries and code examples from libraries I haven't used before. Many of them can solve pretty hard math problems, and these are several steps away from say qwen3.6.

I would not discount running models locally. It's the best case scenario of a future with LLMs from a human rights and ecological perspective.