Liquid has also been very good about keeping speed in mind, and the writeup here makes me expect similar. Really good stuff.
And to beat Qwen3.5-4B with such a capable model is amazing, on top of so many win/draws against 9b in the more general arena.
I can definitely see there being some roles for local agents that offload shell scripting & doing some scut work. I don't know what speed to expect but like, if someone has a decent NPU or GPU and can just get a bunch of basic systems work done with a small local model that could really speed up a lot of workflows that I see day after day after day.
However, after testing it locally, in my imagination I find this model to be a good companion for providing TAB suggestions or essentially an "ask-a-friend" that can generate example snippets of the commonly used libraries (e.g., how to create a pivot table in pandas) or bash programs (ffmpeg command to stream internet radio).
IMHO, expect max capabilities and quality of answers that frontiers models were doing back in late 2024.