alt Hacker NewsI have a M1 Macbook Pro...with only 16gb and I struggled with Qwens2.5-14b trying to do large projects. I loved Qwen but I had to try and do something different. So I switched to Gemma4-12b which looking at it now, seems more like a downgrade than an upgrade.Can you refer me to any Qwen coding models that wont choke my poor 16gb and also connect contextually? I need that context. I love the laser point focus, but I need context and basic understanding of that context.
I don't think "large projects" is realistic with a model that fits in ~8GB (I'm assuming you run stuff other than the model). And, Gemma 4 12B QAT at 4-bits is surely the smartest model in its size, but it shines at vision tasks rather than agentic tasks (though it is a good tool user and can do stuff like research, it's obviously not aimed at code).
You can almost always find free models on OpenRouter. Google AI Studio also has free usage of Gemma 4. Both are rate and usage limited which agentic use will probably chew up pretty quick, but you can usually find some pretty powerful models for free. If you rotate through different providers, I think it avoids the cap. Currently several Nemotron models, North Mini Code, Laguna models, Gemma 4 31b and MoE, Qwen 3 Next, and gpt-oss 120b, are all available free on OpenRouter...and better than anything you can run locally in ~8GB.