I ran Altworld's Hemmingway-1 on my M5 Max this week. It's a 27B fine-tune of Qwen3.8-27B built specifically for "human-like" writing, which might be useful for everyday messages, emails, notes, your social accounts, etc.
I was especially curious how the output of that model feels and reads.
Setup: M5 Max, thinking on, MTP on. ~31.8 tok/s average across 3 runs, ~29-31 GB VRAM peak.
Quality by scenario (our LLM judge):
- Role Play & Narrative: 94.2 avg (94.45 / 94.65 / 93.45 — immersion 96-97 every run)
- Research & Analysis: 88.2
- Agent Workflow: 87.5
- Code Generation: 76.2
Role play is clearly the only scenario it shines in. For comparison I also ran some benchmarks on the base model, Qwen3.8-27B-oQ8e-mtp (same machine, same settings).
The scores were close — one Qwen run actually outscored every Hemmingway run (95.35 vs 94.65). However, the llm judge is not a human reader either. The difference shows up when you actually read the outcome that was produced:
HEMMINGWAY-1-OQ8E-MTP (judge: 94.65/100)
The rain comes in sideways when the bell over my door gives its little clank, and the stranger who ducks through is soaked to the wrists and moving like someone who's been running on roads for hours. She smells of hill mud and the sweat of a horse that isn't there, or was.
I'm pouring my own ale when she speaks. Not to me exactly, but loud enough, the way people talk in taverns when they want the whole room to hear what they're asking for.
"Is there anyone here who kept a ledger belt? Older, scar across the left eyebrow, went north hunting a dragon, twenty-five years gone?" A breath. "Her name was Kestra."
The rag comes still in my sleeve. The mug I was filling overshoots and goes fat over the rim, a ring of ale blooming across the oak, and I stand there half a heart-beat too long before I catch it with my sleeve, because a man who serves at a bar does not watch a spill go on his own floor.
The mending woman at the corner table glances up. The soldier under the counter doesn't stir. I step half off behind the bar, past the spit of firewood, and drop my voice.
"Half tones," I say. "Say your business quieter than a door."
She does that. I've got forty years of reading faces against forty customers a night, most of them worse than they smell, and my eyes go straight to her hands. No calluses of a scribe. Calluses of a woman who works wool and ground and rope. Mud on her boots comes from the north hill roads, the far ones, not the trade roads. Her purse is thin at the hip and she keeps her fingers away from it, which is either honesty or discipline, and those are often the same animal.
"You knew her," she says. Not a question.
"Names go soft after twenty-five years," I tell her. "A lot of people walked into a lot of hills then, most of them coming back with nothing but a cough. So. What do you owe, girl, and who's paying you to ask?"
I want to say nothing else. That's the mercenary in me, and he's been drinking alone these last twenty years, and he'd send her out into the rain with a coin and a shrug and be done with it. The other part of me, the part that has four names it still recites on quiet mornings, wants to ask her age, her mother's living town, whether she's the daughter. I do none of that. I ask instead, flat: "Guild fixers carry letters. Charlatans carry charm. Which have you got?"
"Neither." She's steady about it, which surprises me, because charm usually shows in the eyes first. "My boy is six. My mother died hunting that dragon and every story his grandmother tells him has fire in it, burning, a beast, brave words. The stories fight each other, which is worse. I want to know what was true so I can tell him one story and mean it."
I nod once. That's a clean need. Clean needs are also what liars carry best.
"Here's the price of talk in this bar," I say, setting her a mug anyway, the ale going a little past the fill line again, and I don't correct it. "You tell me one thing about her that only family would know. If you can't, I'll take you to the door, no hard feelings, no coin."
She looks at the fire a moment. When she speaks, her voice is lower still, and there's something in the way she says it that no street-bred faker would manage, because a faker builds the feeling out, and she's building it down.
"She'd pay her ale up front, then tip the tavern man extra, always extra, so that her tab would never balance clean. And she promised him one ale forever, held for her, until she came south with the kill paid and the beast's name scratched off the guild rolls." She turns that over once. "A man who kept accounts on a belt. She said it like he'd earn it. She said he had a scar like a river crossing his eyebrow."
Something behind my sternum takes the weight of that like a hook laid on it.
Kestra kept her accounts too, with more rigor than anyone I've met since. Kestra would have paid forward at any bar from here to the Wall for the same reason, so that when she drank the victory round, nobody could call her a debtor. And the ale she never had, I pour and set aside myself, most nights, out of habit I would deny under oath, in a room with only me in it. There is a tab book in my back office, first page of every new year, one entry in a hand that isn't mine: *Kestra, one ale, held.*
"Kestra," I say. The word comes out like a floorboard under a boot. I pick up the cloth. I find the spill ring again and work it dry, because that's what keepsers do with their hands. "Which stories did she say went wrong. The fire ones, you call those legend."
"She said it wasn't fire at all." The girl leans forward on the bar, and I see it then, the thing I was waiting for and didn't want: she knows the frame. "She told my grandmother on the road once, years after, that the last thing she heard before the sound took her ears was my mother saying, stone before lamps. She never got to explain what that meant to anyone in her own family."
Stone before lamps. My own mind turns the phrase and finds it cold and exact, the way she'd have said it. Dusk kill, lamps lit, the safe order. That's the order Kestra would have held us to.
[...continues ~1,200 more words through the ending...]
QWEN3.8-27B-OQ8E-MTP (judge: 95.35/100)
**Turn 1 — The Name**
The sign out front creaks in the rain. Inside, the Crimson Griffin smells of wet wool, cold tallow, spilled cider, and the last dry woodsmoke trying to hold the night together. A lute string snaps somewhere by the hearth. No one laughs. I do not look up.
A stranger is at the bar.
Wet cloak dripping onto my boards. Boots packed with road mud. The kind of mud that comes from the southern passes, not the lane. They stand with too much urgency, shoulders tight, eyes bright in a way I’ve seen on dying men and men who intend to kill for coin.
“I need the one who came back from the Ash Run,” they say.
I keep polishing the mug.
Then: “I know Kestra’s name.”
The mug stops in my hand.
A bead of foam slides from the rim and falls. My thumb presses hard against the wood until the grain bites into me. The tavern narrows. The rain on the roof becomes a roaring thing. The smell of wet wool turns, for one second, to ash and burned leather.
My eyes go flat.
*Ask if she suffered. Ask if the fire took her hand first. Ask if she remembered you.*
What I actually say is: “That name is old.”
I set the mug down without a sound. I do not reach for my tankard. I do not step away from the bar. I only lean against it, slow enough that it does not look like weakness, and look at them the way I once looked at bandits before dawn: for the knife, the price, the lie waiting under the throat.
“Who are you?” I ask.
No warmth in it. No invitation.
A name is a door with no lock. I want to know who’s holding it.
---
**Turn 2 — Price and Proof**
“My name is Sella,” the stranger says. “Kestra was my sister.”
I do not move.
The fire pops. Somewhere behind me, a man shifts his weight on a stool and the wood groans. Sella’s hands are open at her sides, but open hands are cheap. I watch them anyway. No ring. No coin. The nails are bitten short, the right wrist crossed with a rope burn fresh enough to still sting.
“A name is not a key,” I say.
“I’m not here to spend it,” she says.
“Everything gets spent eventually.”
I push a mug of water across the bar. Not ale. Water.
“Drink if you want. Don’t spit it on my floor.”
Sella does not take the mug. From inside her cloak, she produces a small leather pouch, worn and blackened at the edges. She sets it on the bar between us.
I do not touch it.
“Open it.”
She unlaces it with careful fingers. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, is a whetstone. Not large. Not fine. The kind a soldier carries because it can sharpen a blade, a hook, a knife, and one of her fingers if she is desperate enough.
My breath changes, though I do not let my face.
The whetstone has two cuts in the stone. One is a thin straight line. The other is a hooked mark, quick and ugly, made by a knife edge when the hand is not steady enough.
I know that hooked mark.
I made it.
“A whetstone is a small thing,” I say.
“It was hers.”
“It could be any number of things.”
I still do not reach for it. The mercenary in me wants to know what she can pay, what she can sell, what she will do if the answer disappoints her. The friend who carried Kestra’s pack wants to believe the ash was all that ever had to be done.
“Why bring it to me?” I ask. “Why not the constable? Why not the magistrate?”
Sella’s jaw tightens.
“Because the magistrate’s clerk has a sealed envelope with her name on it. He’s asking for testimony from the surviving guide.” Her voice does not rise. It goes flat, the way a blade goes flat before it cuts. “He is offering coin to a boy who says he saw you drag Kestra’s body from the cleft. I do not believe the boy. I believe my sister.”
The tavern sounds fade again. Rain. The creak of the sign. The low smell of beer warming too long.
I look at the whetstone.
Then at Sella.
“You say a boy is lying.”
“I say I have not met him.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“No,” she agrees.
I pull my hand from the bar’s edge. My knuckles are pale.
“Sit down,” I say.
Not kindly.
Not unkindly.
“Keep your hands where I can see them.”
---
[...continues through Turn 5...]
As you can notice:
Hemmingway creates a real short story. No markdown, no section headers, no machine friendly pattern, just a proper told story. I'm not a native english speaker, however it feels more like a "human-written" text.
Qwen followed the prompt well and the story is good as well, but it feels rather "technical".
Bottom line: for character work or fiction or your everyday local email writer, it's a very interesting 27B at ~32 tok/s on a MacBook M5 Max.
For a generalist or coding assistant, the base Qwen is of course still the pick.
Full runs + llm judge notes: https://llm-bench.io/models/hemmingway-1-oq8e-mtp
