It is hard to explain why it is better. Benchmarks etc., context length, it should be worse than Qwen 3.8 27B and I am sure for long context work it is.

But on my old M1 Max, with "Reasoning strength: low" in the system prompt, it's just kind of nice to use. It's not really slow (despite being a dense model it is faster to actual solutions than the Qwen 3.6 35B MoE), it writes well, etc.

So I use it as a developer-friend and researcher at the moment. Though it is actually the only model I've deployed code from! In general I am still writing my own (because I'm stuck in a bespoke framework on my main project) but it wrote me a plugin I needed for another app without any difficulty.

It's the first local LLM I've considered building hardware for.