// Posts tagged: qwen

A homelab experiment set out to find the optimal context window for a local Qwen 3.6 daily driver. It failed at that job, and revealed a more useful one: three real bugs, a clean speed-versus-depth curve, a prompt cache that hid 93% of the real token count, and a config change worth making in Hermes Agent’s compaction settings. Six tables. Zero cloud tokens spent.

Five local models, six evals, one real job: run Home Assistant, a calendar, an investment portfolio, and a to-do list — all self-hosted, no cloud. Qwen 3.6 holds the crown, but only barely, once three full runs replace one. Meta’s six-day-old Muse Glimmer nearly took it. Hermes 4.3 finishes last twice over. The scores, the failure transcripts, the run-to-run noise, and the one safety-relevant nuance the numbers alone don’t show.