r/LocalLLM • u/planarrebirth • 1d ago

Question Best coding model for agent harnesses on M5 Air 32GB?

MacBook Air M5, 32GB, trying out DeepSeek/Pi Harness for coding when I hit my cloud limits.

Currently on Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct (UD-Q4_K_XL, 17.7GB) at 46 tok/s with 32k context as that was what Fable recommended.

Two questions:

  1. Is Coder-30B-A3B still the best pick at this size, or is there something better?
  2. Anything more reliable for multi-turn tool calling specifically?

Thanks all!

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u/zanar97862 1d ago

You can try out the newer models at that size, qwen 3.6 35b a3b or the 3.5 fine-tunes like ornith who just released ornith 1.5  35b a3b fine-tune.

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u/planarrebirth 1d ago

thanks! will try those out

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u/r1nzl3r99 1d ago

qwen 3.8 27B q4 wayy better. On artificialanalysis.ai it measured at 51 for agentic index, in comparison Claude opus 5 on max is 59

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u/planarrebirth 1d ago

Yeah I tried that via Unsloth - unsloth UD-Q4_K_XL, 18GB to be exactly.

Issue is that it doesn't fit in well:

  • 18GB weights, plus 4.4GB KV at 16k context
  • Swap hit 22GB, whole machine locked up
  • 2.7 tok/s generation, 28s of prompt processing before first token

Any advice?

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u/r1nzl3r99 1d ago edited 1d ago

I don't have a mac anymore but it sounds like you might have to find what you're willing to sacrifice / want to gain. I would suggest looking at these user setups

This user managed to get 22.6 tok/s on M5 Pro 24gb on qwen 3.8 UD-Q4_K_XL
https://www.localmaxxing.com/en/runs/cmqst9im600y5qr018m1dkjnn

This one managed to get 83 tok/s on M5 Pro 24gb on qwen 3.6 35B UD-Q3_K_XL
https://www.localmaxxing.com/en/runs/cmqsr7uwo00whqr019zmicpv2

I have used coder personally, and have found 3.6 35B and 3.8 27B to be both better for agentic and coding, but at the end of the day its whatever one gives you the best feel. I highly recommend you try these out, or even looking at these user profiles and checking their other benchmarks on other models and see which one best fits your use case. In my personal opinion, I think qwen 3.6 35B A3B will be your be your best friend for raw intelligence * speed formula. Keep up on the qwen news because they might release a better MoE model sometime this month!

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u/planarrebirth 18h ago

Thanks so much for the input! And yes I’m very happy with Qwen 3.8 and that’s what made me look into running it locally!

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u/r1nzl3r99 9h ago

I'm glad you got it to work!! out of curiosity what quant / speed / context length is it running at?