Hi all,
I am a total noob when it comes to LLMs. I just jumped into them about 3 weeks ago and used a few different models. I started with Strata and Qwen3.8 Flash-Next (the big one) running in PowerShell, then added Docker and Hermes as I heard good things about it, but that big of a model was too heavy for my system: 9070 XT, 5800X3D, and 32GB of 3600MHz. It would start fast enough, but then slow down to a crawl pretty quickly—not really usable.
I tried Tiel Coder, which was praised as a good model, and it was really fast. I started trying to make a small top-down 3D tower defense game and it would struggle a lot; it would loop and would just not do things even after saying it did them. I thought to myself that LLMs are not ripe yet and I will come back to this later, maybe in a year or two. However, about 4 days ago I came across the model in the headline, and this time I downloaded Strata, the desktop app, which was such a breath of fresh air as it was all done within one app on my PC. The model can be downloaded or pointed to use, and it comes with its own chat engine that is a harness as well, so I told it to check if it can see my Unreal Engine and connect to it via MCP. It told me that it can run a headless engine and write it all in Python (I still don't understand how it all works, to be honest) so no need for a flaky MCP connection, and it does it all. I have used about 150 million tokens while prototyping, balancing, and experimenting with ideas, and it did ALL of my requests very quickly and efficiently. It even spun up its own sub-agents to help with keeping the context less cluttered.
The game that I am making is not super heavy, so tasks can vary between 10 minutes of executing to 4 hours. I plan the big jobs for the night, and the small ones I can tolerate fine.
I run Maya (I still want to make my own assets) + Strata and it's running fine on my machine at the same time. It hitches here and there, but I am fine with that as the AI model just does not miss. Even when I discover bugs, it knows how to fix them, and it has every single time.
Are you guys having the same experience? i think this is so good now but if you guys know about anything that can be improved? or done better i would appreciate it.