Gemma 4 IS good, I've literally had it get a thing right that Opus 4.7 missed, the edges are ragged and I'm reliably finding usecases where it's basically equivalent. Ultimately the metric is "what can I RELY on it to do". Opus definitely knows a lot more and can sometimes do much more complex tasks, but especially when you're good about feeding the context Gemma is amazing. The difference between the sets of things I trust the two models to do is surprisingly small. I've had some insanely good runs recently working on my personal tooling as well as random projects. The first local model that can reliably left to implement features in agentic mode on non-trivial projects.

https://thot-experiment.github.io/gradient-gemma4-31b/

This is a relatively complex piece of tooling built entirely by Gemma 4 inside OpenCode where I manually intervened maybe only 4 times over the course of a few hours.

running Q6_K_XL, 128k context @ q8 ~ 800tok/s read 16tok/sec write

eagerly awaiting turboquant and MTP in llama.cpp, should take me to 256k and 25-30tok/s if the rumors are true

Re-posting this from a buried comment for visibility because it's just so fucking impressive to me.

I went to the store to buy mixers and while I was out Gemma 4 31b got pretty far along with reverse engineering the bluetooth protocol of a desk thermometer I have. I forgot to turn on the web search tool, so it just went at it, writing more and more specific diagnostic logging/probing tools over the course of like 8 turns. It connected to the thermometer, scanned the characteristics and had made a dump of the bluetooth notification data. When I got back it was theorizing about how the data might be encoded in the bluetooth characteristics and it got into an infinite loop. (local models aren't perfect and i never said they were) I turned on the websearch tool and told it to "pick up the project where it left off", it read the directory, did a couple googles and had a working script to print temperature, humidity and battery state in like 3 turns. Reading back throught it's chain of thought I'm pretty sure it would have been able to get it eventually without googling.

idk, I thought I was a cool and smart engineer type for being able to do stuff like this, if my GPUs being able to do this more or less unsupervised isn't impressive I guess fuck me lol.