points by UncleOxidant 2 days ago | 0 comments
Is anyone going to seriously use a model this small for coding? Doesn't seem like the intended use case or strength of these models.
[–] pqb 1 day ago
No, especially not for generative coding like all folks do with Claude Code - this model is not meant for that. It will produce code that mixes too many things at once, creating spaghetti code and likely having difficulty producing a compilable artifact. I suppose tool calling is also far from the frontier of class models.
However, after testing it locally, in my imagination I find this model to be a good companion for providing TAB suggestions or essentially an "ask-a-friend" that can generate example snippets of the commonly used libraries (e.g., how to create a pivot table in pandas) or bash programs (ffmpeg command to stream internet radio).
IMHO, expect max capabilities and quality of answers that frontiers models were doing back in late 2024.
[–] samstevens 2 days ago
definitely would not recommend using it for SWE-style tasks. But chaining a couple bash calls together to find a file? no problem
And to beat Qwen3.5-4B with such a capable model is amazing, on top of so many win/draws against 9b in the more general arena.
I can definitely see there being some roles for local agents that offload shell scripting & doing some scut work. I don't know what speed to expect but like, if someone has a decent NPU or GPU and can just get a bunch of basic systems work done with a small local model that could really speed up a lot of workflows that I see day after day after day.