This seems to vary by person. I get immense value in coding assistance from Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B which is like a frontier model from a year ago. But a lot of people say it’s stupid, useless, a toy, etc. I do work by the “short leash” method and mainly just use the model for brainstorming/planning/design assistance and zipping through the drudgery of boilerplate and executing refactors. I don’t think this tier of model is good for “hey LLM, build me a Github clone” ... but I also don’t see the value in that use anyway.

Caveat: I have not been able to try that model locally, so no personal experience. Running this locally at usable speeds would be cost prohibitive for personal coding use for me.

But if we can believe you that it's doing what a Claude model was doing a year ago then I'd say: OMG no I really never want to go back to that level of frustration getting an agent to do what I want it to do.

Could you expand more on what you do with qwen3.6? Because I couldn't get the denser 27B version to do trivial "take this pattern, repeat it over a single file with minimal thought, just slightly beyond what I can do with sed" reliably.

> I don’t think this tier of model is good for “hey LLM, build me a Github clone” ... but I also don’t see the value in that use anyway.

What could be more valuable than outputting the exact thing you asked for?