Shoutout to Gemma4 as a conversational assistant / agent

I'm seriously impressed by Gemma4 26B A4B. On my M5 Pro (so not much memory bandwidth by GPU standards), it's blazingly fast and it's a very good generalist / everyday local LLM.

It has a little bit of personality to its responses, and seems to perform decently for everything: creative writing, debugging and coding, random chats, image recognition and classification, etc. If you want, give it a web search tool/API of your choice, and it really sings as an everyday local LLM.

I tried Qwen3.6 35B A3B, and the coding performance feels close (slight lead for Qwen; but it's bigger params so I have less free RAM), but it's noticeably worse than Gemma on non-coding tasks, and generally feels bit more 'robotic' to chat to and work with.