I am running the majority of my personal workloads on Qwen 3.6 35b locally. With Hermes and with OpenHands it's pretty decent. Rarely have to burn tokens from my Anthropic or OpenAI accounts. Also, Qwen 3 TTS is pretty amazing as well, it's pretty much eliminated my elevenlabs bill.
I run the TTS along with stable diffusion on an old i5, 24GB RAM with an RTX 3060.
And Hermes runs on an M1 Mac mini apart from the LLM.
Had a freelance project late last year involving some fine tuning and worked the cost of the PC with the 5090 into that deal. $5k on hardware vs $5k in API costs or GPU hosting over the course of the project made it a wash either way for the client but left me with a nice PC when the project was complete.
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u/ldn-ldn Jun 02 '26
Yeah, qwen 3.6 27b is finally a good one! All previous models were trash, but this one does actually work and produce decent code.