| My experience so far has been Qwen3.5:32b-a3b-coder via Claude Code on a MBP 64gb M4, and a MBP 32gb M5. Just found about qwen3.6 so downloading that currently. on 64GB M4 I find it's able to do things fairly well. The few times I run out of tokens, I hop over to that and I'm mostly unimpeded. I compare it to the Haiku models, where you have to go in and be surgical about your changes, or like others have said, guide a junior. on 32GB M5, I find that it works, but around the 30% ctx threshold it slows down quite substantially, so more need to be surgical in your requests. I'll often just have my IDE open and Claude. But maybe I've been too comfortable talking to Sonnet/Opus and so forget I need to be more deliberate in my requests. My finding here is that the harness is a big part of the problem. CC seems to be very good with Qwen in my experience. Better than OpenCode. I also run DeepSeek for some other non-structured data tasks and to generate a to-do out of that. That's not coding, so won't go into that, other than to say it's very competent as a small model left to run in the background and automate small parts of my life and process. tl;dr it's totally doable on a 32gb mbp using ollama, but be precise in your requests and guidance. |