I never got into any of the AI models because it was clear local first was going to be more valueable, if they were to replace coding tasks.

I tried out a few models and ended up going with either Qwen3-Coder-Next (no think, just do) and Qwen3.6-35B (thinking, w/llamacpp token budget). Created a customized prompt that works fairly well to around ~60k tokens and then is a toss up on whether it's poisoned itself or I've directly steered it into the wrong. When it's clear that's happened, if it's important to continue, ask it to write a doc then start fresh.

I don't kno whow any one cold have witnessed the last 2 decades of American VC funded tech startups and tell themselves, "you know, this will be a reliable technolgy with no hidden problems".

Even a sober technical evaluation is just two steps:

1. You're proposing to build a app on a non-deterministic model.

2. That model is hosted behind a non-deterministic system (model alignment, model guardrails, system context subterfuge, cost/token pricing)

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So you want to build your app and you think you're going to kep up with both #1 and #2?