> This thing can accomplish the same results as the frontier models do

What frontier models are you using? I'm literally sitting with Qwen 3.8 27B locally and trying my damnest to get it to work at least 80% of the quality Astra et al have, and can't get close to it. It keeps being so verbose, regardless of inference parameters, system prompts, reasoning effort, and keeps going on tangents. I'm running the BF16 weights via vLLM, can't imagine how much worse the experience must be with the quantized weights people run with the average consumer GPU.

Even with tight guiding, as I guess you could say I do more "AI pair-programming" than vibecoding, it just loses the plot to often and waste time, enough that it's clearly not an alternative to today's frontier models.

Unless you are trying to prove some hard math, or writing extremely complex code, for general coding tasks (which represent 90% of code out there) 27B-Q6_K is more than enough. Q4 does it well too, but might need a few more iterations.

For comparison, I also used GLM-5.3, Muse-Spark etc, with no significant improvement for ordinary/BAU coding tasks.