As amazing? I suppose not.

Good enough? Quite probably, unless you're in the "coding is solved, specify loops and walk away" frame of mind.

32GB (or say a 48GB-unified RAM unified machine) gets you Qwen 3.8 27B at a good adaptive Q4, maybe Q5. Muse Glimmer at Q4 and Q5, etc.

These models can code well enough in an agentic way, I find, and the chat-to-assistant scenario is just fine in Unsloth Desktop or LM Studio.

A slightly lighter harness helps; a lighter system prompt is entirely possible, especially for Muse Glimmer, which is post-trained so effectively for agentic helper tasks that it barely seems to need a system prompt at all except for a "plan" mode.

Tool use is all fine, all that.