I've been periodically testing the strongest reported models as they come out, and which can fit on my 32GB M1 Max. I've yet to find one that I feel is genuinely useful.

My latest attempts were with 4 bit quants of Qwen 3.5, both 9b and 35B.

Both, on my very first query, something along the lines of "sup dog" or "how does beer a compare to beer b" led to an endless loop of thinking that I eventually had to manually stop in each case.

And yet I keep seeing passing comments about people using local LLMs to be productive.

Just curious what your strategies are, what the usecases are, and anything I may be missing.