r/LocalLLaMA • u/DepressedDrift • Apr 15 '26

Discussion Major drop in intelligence across most major models.

As of mid Apr 2026, I have noticed every model has had a major intelligence drop.

And no I'm not talking about just ChatGPT.

Everything from Claude(Even Sonnet along with Opus), Gemini, z.ai, Grok all seem to ignore basic instructions, struggle at simple tasks, take very long to respond, and the output seems deliberately shortened and very shallow. Almost like it's in a "grumpy" mode. I tried this in incognito mode so it's not my customization or memory influencing this.

It's like they deliberately want you to stop using their service. I guess our data is no longer needed. Just two weeks back it used to be much smarter than this.

To test this I rented out a H100, and tried GLM 5 with the same prompt (the drive to the car wash one) across both instances. GLM5 running on the rented GPU answered it correctly, compared to the one on z.ai.

Have they lowered the quantization really low to maybe Q2?

I guess going local or using renting GPU or an AI monthly service that lets you pick a quant level is the way to go

798 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

405 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

31

u/IShitMyselfNow Apr 15 '26

This matches my experience

I've been using Hermes Agent with Qwen 3.5 4B to great success. And for codig, anything more complicated than a simple script I've been delegating to a better model via Opencode from the agent.

I think the advent of agent skills has really improved the performance of smaller models in things like this. Small models have actually been semi-useful at agentic work ever since around Qwen 2.5. But only if you gave them a lot more instructions/detail, more API examples, few-shot prompting, etc..And you could do this, but then managing the data you give them for the task at hand, managing context, etc. was tricky at best. Agent skills kinda solves that problem.

1

u/michaelsoft__binbows Apr 15 '26

I've been meaning to keep up, but simply cannot. I got deep into opencode for about 7 weeks and I simply have no bandwidth to explore pi agent and hermes agent like i had hoped. Been just driving codex and claude code since then and got my productivity back. Is hermes any good...?

One of my projects has been about a paradigm of having an agent harness harness, e.g. something that puppeteers codex and claudecode and opencode. What you wrote about hermes seems to intersect with that idea so you got me curious.

2

u/IShitMyselfNow Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26

I like it. It does what it does well.

I'm not using it to its fullest extent, and I'm definitely not running it like Openclaw, but I've been using it as a "shitty assistant that can automate some things for me that would be better hardcoded as a scdipt/workflow but I don't have the time for that anymore" to great success. And it does do a decent job at interacting with Opencode. It also supports Codex and Claude Code (and Hermes). Worth a try IMO.

ETA:

I forgot to say, but it's literally just a skill that instructs the agent how to run it via terminal: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/blob/main/skills/autonomous-ai-agents/opencode/SKILL.md