Qwen3.6 27B quants

I have a project (picture) entirely made with bartowski 27B IQ3 XXS, turbo3 (and some parts with unsloth IQ3 XXS turbo4 when MTP became available).
The project works as intended. Is fast, reliable... it just works.

I've read so many arguments around minimum quantization to still get good quality, that I went ahead an made a small test to get some peace of mind. Am I missing big architectural and code quality advantages using this low quant model? Wouldn't be better to take some more time and get responses from a stronger tier?

So I made a simple request/prompt:
"Take a look at the code and architecture choices and tell me a better way to do it and why.
Make a "ActionPlan_Qwwn3.6_27B.md" with a multi-step action plan for implementation by another agent."

I put this through the Qwen3.6 27B (unsloth) in two variants (5070ti 16Gb):

1. Q8, uncompressed K/V ( 1h56m, 306pp/3tg )
2. IQ3 XXS turbo4 ( 0h5m, 1230pp/50tg )

I then use the same model to make a comparison table with the differences between both plans. Not to bother you with the full table results, I'm just going to leave here the final conclusion the model put after the table:

_______________
Recommendation:

• Q8 (full K/V) is stronger on: preventing race conditions at the API level, consolidating polling endpoints, and input sanitization.
• IQ3 XXS turbo4 is stronger on: atomic file writes, proper thread lifecycle management, health checks, and modular code organization.
• Best approach: Merge both — take the Q8 (full K/V) Phase 1 (launch protection, unified poll, parameter sanitization) + IQ3 XXS turbo4 Step 1.1–1.3 (atomic writes, thread lifecycle) as a combined Phase 1 foundation.

_______________

My take: IQ3 XXS is good enough (I would say very good) for ordinary coding tasks - if you only have 16Gb, you won't be missing all that much: good judgement and good prompt are way more important on a project like this

https://preview.redd.it/da25acl6tm7h1.png?width=2541&format=png&auto=webp&s=58753db133e71cb1b1b69df2880af296d49f070b