ironically, coding is the area that small models excel most at. qwen 3.6 27b is an insane agentic model. but Opus can be much more than a programmer: language tutor, knowledgeable "friend", therapist
I feel like the car usecase demonstrates that these models are not really useful for the cutting edge: They produce exactly the kind of in-domain data that already exists in droves. What is needed, and what tesla collects, are the edge cases!
(Now for a startup with zero data, this is of course still useful)
I feel like there is no portable advice for performance. A torch model exported as onnx is a different model.
That onnx model run using onnxruntime with cuda ep is a different model than the one run with TRT ep.
And even among the same runtime, depending on the target hardware and the memory available during tuning, the model behaves differently. It is a humongous mess
don't know about this guy, but qwen3.6:27b with the UD 4bit quant and little-coder/pi has been amazing. the first local LLM experience that can do actual meaningful work