Agents on a 16GB MacBook Air M5: Qwen 3.5-9B 4-bit can't yet build a working app

Fluid-Author-9566 · reddit · 2026-09-07

A developer experiments with running agents on a 16GB MacBook Air M5 using Qwen 3.5-9B (4-bit) with a 12k context window served via optiq-mlx. So far the model fails to produce a working app from prompts like 'create a react + vite todo list app', hitting tool-call budget limits. They ask the community for current best practices for 'tiny agent' workflows on consumer hardware.

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