I tried qwen3.5:4b in ollama on my 4 year old Mac M1 with my own coding harness and it exhibited pretty decent tool calling, but it is a bit slow and seemed a little confused with the more complex tasks (also, I have it code rust, that might add complexity). The task was “find the debug that does X and make it conditional based on the whichever variable is controlled by the CLI ‘/debug foo’” - I didn’t do much with it after that.
It may be interesting to try a 6bit quant of qwen3.5-35b-a3b - I had pretty good results with it running it on a single 4090 - for obvious reasons I didn’t try it on the old mac.
I am using 8bit quant of qwen3.5-27b as more or less the main engine for the past ~week and am quite happy with it - but that requires more memory/gpu power.
It may be interesting to try a 6bit quant of qwen3.5-35b-a3b - I had pretty good results with it running it on a single 4090 - for obvious reasons I didn’t try it on the old mac.
I am using 8bit quant of qwen3.5-27b as more or less the main engine for the past ~week and am quite happy with it - but that requires more memory/gpu power.
HTH.