About whether a small 27B model that runs on a phone is good at coding and tool calling.
Has this happened?
Yes 17 (17%)Not sure 51 (50%)No 33 (33%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether a small 27B model that runs on a phone is good at coding and tool calling.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
From my own experiments with local, low VRAM model use vs. what I'm used to from using Claude at work is that being good at "coding" is of no use, if you're worse at "tool calling" as coding in an agentic way requires quite a bit of tool calling.
If you can "hide" different models of 8GB VRAM requirements each that have those specialties and mix and match them for me without having to manage it manually, I'll be impressed. Until then I will keep using my Claude, because "remarkably good _for their size_" models I've tried so far just sucked at trying to use them the way I code at work with Claude.