Post might be a tiny bit long. Hate words, skip. But it's not too bad though. Also, I've been Qwen-gang for a long time, check my receipts. That said... I started my agentic journey with Qwen 3.5 around May 31st. I'd heard about agents before, but never had a chance to play around because I didn't have any cloud memberships at the time. I've done most of my coding using free services: gemini and claude sonnet. It's been a lot of fun. When Qwen 3.5 dropped, it was the first time a local model felt like cloud. Sure, it wasn't on the same intelligence level, but it didn't feel that far off. So I dived in hardcore learning everything I can. I decided to build my own infrastructure/harness rather than going with hermes, pi or one of the others. I'm glad I did because it taught me so much. It was hard, because I had to learn everything from scratch, and the road has been extremely stressful and challenging, but the knowledge I picked up along the way has been well worth it. I'm able to conceive ideas and implement strategies in ways I never imaged, and I honestly don't think I would have learned even a fraction of what I know now if I'd worked with cloud models, because they might have one-shotted the results, robbing me of the challenge to grow. Things got even better after Qwen 3.6 27B dropped. Since then, people have been singing the praises of Qwen, and how close it is to the cloud models. I also felt it wasn't far behind. I've made quite a few posts praising Qwen and sharing my experience, and those posts were real and authentic. But all of these people claiming to be cancelling their cloud subscriptions and replacing them with Qwen? That's an overreach. Those people either a) are bots, or b) have extremely simple use cases that they were wasting subscriptions on, because anyone who's used cloud for anything agentic and a tiny bit complex won't walk away from that experience looking at local the same again. I'm extremely thankful for Qwen because it put me in the game and started me on this journey. But my ambitions reached a point where Qwen just wasn't able to get me there without tons of mistakes. The "shine" wore off the more complex my needs grew. It's still very capable, and I figured out some ways to increase its intelligence (and yes, you can increase the core model's intelligence without training using a harness and multiple agents, but that's a whole 'nother discussion), but it became a time thing. I started getting extremely frustrated and cursing at Qwen for its stupidity. I'd been using cloud models for code stuff, but they weren't agentic. But my sister let me use her chat-gpt subscription and I finally yielded and decided to give it a try. Long story short - and out of respect for this reddit, because it's about local, not cloud - I'll just say that it's been a completely different experience. A really, really good one. My project is moving along now and I'm getting a lot of work done, and it feels surreal. There's a real difference between local agents and cloud agents. So, when you guys hear everyone saying cloud is dead, they're probably not human, because it's not even in the same ballpark. I've just been using Sol light, and it's ridiculous. I can't even imagine what Sol Medium or Astra are like. I have no intention of abandoning local. I'm using Sol to help me advance my harness so that it will be faster, smarter, and more gooder (in my best Grimlock voice). I sweat blood and tears working with my local agent and I can't wait to see how much it's improved with the new brain I've built for it. And I'm going to continue finding ways to make local the best it can be. And like you guys, I'm hopeful that the gap between local and sota will continue to close. I guess what I've learned from this whole ordeal is, if you just want to get things done or built without understanding how it works, go with cloud. But if you want to grow and better understand how things works, and feel more empowered through each challenge, go with local. Grunge P.s. - I don't want to imply that you can't learn with cloud either, but it for sure would have robbed me of some of the dead ends that forced me to expand my knowledge.   submitted by   /u/GrungeWerX [link]   [comments]