Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

Simon Willison’s Weblog Subscribe Sponsored by: Honeycomb — AI agents behave unpredictably. Get the context you need to debug what actually happened. Read the blog Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model (via) Big claims from Qwen about their latest open weight model: Qwen3.6-27B delivers flagship-level agentic coding performance, surpassing the previous-generation open-source flagship Qwen3.5-397B-A17B (397B total / 17B active MoE) across all major coding benchmarks. On Hugging Face Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is 807GB, this new Qwen3.6-27B is 55.6GB. I tried it out with the 16.8GB Unsloth Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF:Q4_K_M quantized version and llama-server using this recipe by benob on Hacker News, after first installing llama-server using brew install llama.cpp: llama-server \ -hf unsloth/Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF:Q4_K_M \ --no-mmproj \ --fit on \ -np 1 \ -c 65536 \ --cache-ram 4096 -ctxcp 2 \ --jinja \ --temp 0.6 \ --top-p 0.95 \ --top-k 20 \ --min-p 0.0 \ --presence-penalty 0.0 \ --repeat-penalty 1.0 \ --reasoning on \ --chat-template-kwargs '{"preserve_thinking": true}' On first run that saved the ~17GB model to ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/models--unsloth--Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF. Here's the transcript for "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle". This is an outstanding result for a 16.8GB local model: Performance numbers reported by llama-server: Reading: 20 tokens, 0.4s, 54.32 tokens/s Generation: 4,444 tokens, 2min 53s, 25.57 tokens/s For good measure, here's Generate an SVG of a NORTH VIRGINIA OPOSSUM ON AN E-SCOOTER (run previously with GLM-5.1): That one took 6,575 tokens, 4min 25s, 24.74 t/s. Posted 22nd April 2026 at 4:45 pm Recent articles Is Claude Code going to cost $100/month? Probably not - it's all very confusing - 22nd April 2026 Where's the raccoon with the ham radio? (ChatGPT Images 2.0) - 21st April 2026 Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7 - 18th April 2026 This is a link post by Simon Willison, posted on 22nd April 2026. ai 1977 generative-ai 1753 local-llms 155 llms 1720 qwen 55 pelican-riding-a-bicycle 108 llama-cpp 28 llm-release 194 ai-in-china 94 Monthly briefing Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments. Pay me to send you less! Sponsor & subscribe Disclosures Colophon © 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026