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0 pointsmark_l_watson1mo ago0 comments

Fine, I guess. The only commercial API I use to any great extent is gemini-3-flash-preview: cheap, fast, great for tool use and with agentic libraries. The 3.1-pro-preview is great, I suppose, for people who need it.

Off topic, but I like to run small models on my own hardware, and some small models are now very good for tool use and with agentic libraries - it just takes a little more work to get good results.

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throwaway20271mo ago

Seconded. Gemini used to be trash and I used Claude and Codex a lot but gemini-3-flash-preview punches above it's weight, it's decent and I rarely if ever run into any token limit either.

verdverm1mo ago

Thirded, I've been using gemini-3-flash to great effect. Anytime I have something more complicated, I give it to pro & flash to see what happens. Coin flip if flash is nearly equivalent (too many moving vars to be analytical at this point)

PlatoIsADisease1mo ago

What models are you running locally? Just curious.

I am mostly restricted to 7-9B. I still like ancient early llama because its pretty unrestricted without having to use an abliteration.

mark_l_watsonOP1mo ago

I experimented with many models on my 16G and 32G Macs. For less memory, qwen3:4b is good, for the 32B Mac, gpt-oss:20b is good. I like the smaller Mistral models like mistral:v0.3 and rnj-1:latest is a pretty good small reasoning model.

nurettin1mo ago

I like to ask claude how to prompt smaller models for the given task. With one prompt it was able to make a low quantized model call multiple functions via json.

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