Qwen 3.5 4B scores 10/10 running a coding agent fully offline on a 16GB MacBook Air
Ok-Brush8377 · reddit · 2026-11-14
After criticism that agent benchmarks only use big hardware, the author ran Qwen 3.5 4B and 9B fully offline on a 16GB MacBook Air with the Atomic Agent framework (loop check to prevent repetition). Task: build a Python expense tracker. The 4B scored 10/10 on one real function (parsing two messy bank CSVs), even writing its own tests and fixing bugs; the 9B got 7/10 on the same function and 22/50 on the full app (5 files, 50 hidden tests, 25 min), writing 638 lines early then self-correcting until timeout. Takeaway: small models on cheap laptops ace focused tasks but finish only half a whole app in 25 minutes. Single run, single task — a first look, not a benchmark.
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