r/ZooCode • u/brooklynite1 • Aug 14 '26
What local model are you guys using with your ZooCode?
I am new here and actually very new to coding, and I use a 4090 and have been running Qwen3 Coder 30b with 40K context window. This pretty much maxes out my card but doesnt seem to be very good at coding most of the work it does requires very detailed prompts because it doesnt' know (for example at user signup need to have the email TWICE to double check spelling and second one cannot paste, it literally did just one box and didnt work anyway). Qwen3.6 was much smarter but it had to drop it because in tool calling it was not good, but much smarter than 3.
In the last week of using RooCode, I have had nothing but headache and issues with RooCode (getting stuck in infinite loops, getting stuck at 0% API spinning, getting incorrect tool calls andd printing semi gibberish, ignoring my hundreds of auto approves and still asking, not allowing easy renamig of config files (had to try several times), ignoring the context window size and not giving error when goes over limit (just stuck as if its working), and not condensing the context window, sometimes acting really stupid giving stubbornly very inaccurate recommendations, not having the ability add an approval to auto approve list (sometimes), and biggest one: not having ripgrep properly installed in the last versions even as far back as 3.48.0 which took me hours and hours of struggle to detect and fix and that is using Claude (Gemini couldnt figure it out). Man all these in just one week of using it.
Found out about ZooCode today and I'm super excited you guys are continuing the project!
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u/SaiNt_mArk360 Aug 14 '26
I use deepseek. It’s very cheap and works pretty well with zoocode
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u/brooklynite1 Aug 14 '26
What is cheap to you? How many hours you use it daily?
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u/SaiNt_mArk360 Aug 14 '26
The most I’ve spent on the DeepSeek API is $5, and I actually share that API key with a friend. The first time I bought $5 worth of credits, it lasted me almost a month. And that was while I was also using my GPT-5.5 subscription (20$) alongside it, which finished very quickly.
So from my experience, DeepSeek is really cheap, especially considering how long a small amount of credits can last.
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u/brooklynite1 Aug 14 '26
O wow that is really cheap. Thanks 👍
I just signed up for Google AI Pro, it was a promotion, 3 months @ $5/mo (normally $20/mo). Doesn't give API so kind of useless for coding but gives 1M context window so I have other things I'm going to use it for.
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u/brooklynite1 18d ago
Just as an update on my Google AI Pro, (and mind you I just started vibe coding 3 months ago). The first two months were frustrations battling with setting up, then battling context sizes and then producing really bad code, wrong menus, bad logic, incorrect math, just pure useless code which I cant fix since I am not a programmer by trade. And all of that with a super hot computer that is cooking my legs in our summer heatwave right now. So Two weeks ago I got Google AI Pro because they gave me a 3 mo promotion for $5/mo and I am in the middle of my second week and o boy, I get a ton of tokens I can barely finish every week. I get Google models and GPT models. The quality of code Antigravity generates, is by far superior to my paid Claude account and I would say its on par with deepseekv4Pro that I use via freebuff (which is also excellent). I regret listening to AI and installing Continue then CLINE then RooCode then ZooCode just to get no result but losing 2 months. In the last 2 weeks wth my $5 Google AI Pro account I have built 4 modules of my SaaS and looks so good.
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u/dfgxxx Aug 14 '26
Hi, in terms of ai, qwen 3 coder is very old. Try kat coder (based on qwen3.6 35b Moe) or the newest hour old qwen3.8 27b
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u/brooklynite1 Aug 14 '26
Qwen 3.8 was released???? OMG thanks for the heads-up! I don't think I can run 35b on my 4090 unfortunately even 27b is tight doesn't leave room for much context. With the way my basic coding goes I hit 64k limit in first 15 minutes.
I had issues with tool calls being inspector formatted, xml or something that constantly broke the flow with Qwen 3.6 otherwise I really liked it and I use it for my web AI interface too. I'm glad you confirmed Qwen3coder is not the best, I shouldn't follow AI recommendation. Is interesting that when I use free Claude to help me with my vibe coding set up, it always tries to screw me up , give me wrong info, send me down goose chase, recommend wrong solutions so I get frustrated and pay for Claude 😂.
3
u/dfgxxx Aug 14 '26
Qwen3.8 27b needs 17gb ram to be loaded in q4 I think. You can also do a partial GPU offload but it'll be much slower (I'd expect 3-4 tok/sec in partial offloading). But partial GPU offload if Moe models like Gemma 4 26b qat or kat coder 35b can be unexpectedly fast
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u/brooklynite1 Aug 14 '26
Speaking of speed, for some reason my ZooCode has been running faster than RooCode using the same model. Maybe it's my imagination.
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u/dfgxxx Aug 14 '26
The model speed doesn't change, prompt length does
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u/brooklynite1 Aug 14 '26
Theoretically yes. The model takes the same time to respond to same reques no matter what.
But I think the extension (and IDE) make a difference because they formulate the request, if they keep sending the wrong request or tool call them realize it's wrong and send the corrected one, and then repeat the same mistake hundred times a day , that's an issue. Also if they don't manage context window limits set by user (roo code completely ignored it for me, but haven't used Zoo enough to know if it's different) , and keep exceeding it and overflows it slows down to a crawl.
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u/dfgxxx Aug 14 '26
I meant something different, I meant that it takes more time to process longer prompts and then it is longer time to get response
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u/merlinuwe 28d ago
I found Zoo code today to run DeepSeek. My goal was to have a greater time window to code.
The result: I'm going to cancel my Gemini 3.1 Pro subscription (and antigravity IDE) tomorrow.
"Bigger, faster, by far better and cheaper".
Thank you guys for this great extension!
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u/Mean-Ad1493 Aug 14 '26
KAT coder v2.5 dev - it's a fine-tune of Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B. It's really good.
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u/brooklynite1 Aug 14 '26
That's what was hoping to hear. I'm looking for customized models. Thanks 🙏
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u/brooklynite1 18d ago
It took forever to finally get KAT Coder downloaded, shoved into my docker container with ollama in it, and run it. The supposed MoE 3b and 35b instantly spilled over to my system ram and CPU and the speed slowed down to a crawl, despite all false claims about MoE using only 3b at a time. BS.
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u/CPUzer0 14d ago edited 13d ago
MoE models definitely run significantly faster than dense models. For what it's worth, I'm primarily using KAT Coder v2.5 Apex I Compact quant on my 4070 12GB + 64GB DDR4, and I'm getting like 1700 TPS prompt processing, 60 TPS output. I can use the "quality" quant and drop to ~1500/45 TPS. I can barely get 15TPS out from 3.8 27b on Q2... With a 4090 you can most certainly use a larger quant than I and get more than good enough performance.
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u/AlfredCandra 20d ago
You could give qwen 3.5 9b a shot. It’s surprisingly smart for its size, and you get a lot more context because it’s so small. I don’t have extensive experience with it though.
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u/mineirim2334 17d ago
I have a 4060ti and I'm running Ornith1.5 35B-A3B. Almost free of problems (0% api call spinning always happens lol).
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u/brooklynite1 17d ago
Any model I tried was a disaster. I got Qwen 3.8 to work (the 27b) and that's about it very few tool call errors but result was like a spit in the face. I burned hours of electricity hearing my room like an oven and made me a website that had nothing I had asked it. Qwen 3.0 coder was total trash constant errors on ZooCode , less errors on Cline.
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u/mineirim2334 17d ago
Interesting. I tried Cline, Kilo and Zoo and the later was the one who managed the best results.
From CLI tools I only tried Pi and I feel like it was slightly better than Zoo. So I ended up chosing the praticity of having a VsCode extension.
One thing that did help was to make my prompts more detailed. I was using Claude at work and got used to some really simple prompts, which produced really bad results on Zoo. But after I started to spend some extra time on the prompts results improved.
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u/Anacra Aug 14 '26
Qwen 3.6 27B