With good orchestration and delegation you can get surprisingly far with small models running on consumer hardware.

I could run Qwen 3.6 27B on my laptop, but at 5 tok/s it was too slow even without overthinking - I never used it. OTOH, Qwen 3.6 35B A3B ran at 20 tok/s but it just could not get done what I asked of it. It sort of got close but you had to repeat and retry so much that it might have been faster to run 27B dense... maybe?

So that said, I might take a much better model that runs 2-3x slower (total time per task) but that's more capable over a faster, less capable one.

I'd also like to try a proper "plan-then-execute" type execution where thinking is entirely disabled (or low) during the execution stage but enabled/max during the planning stage.

I will definitely give 3.8 27B a better shot than 3.6 though.

https://huggingface.co/bottlecapai/ThinkingCap-Qwen3.6-27B

And then a Bonsai ternary on top of that model.