Tiny, 4b or less models are designed for finetuning for some narrow tasks; this way can outperform large commercial models for a tiny fraction of price. Also great for code autocomplete.
7b-8b are great coding assistants if all you need is dumb fast refactoring, that cannot quite be done with macros and standard editor functionality but still primitive, such as "rename all methods having at least one argument of type SomeType by prefixing their names with "ST_".
12b is a threshold where models start writing coherent prose such Mistral Nemo or Gemma 3 12b.
7b-8b are great coding assistants if all you need is dumb fast refactoring, that cannot quite be done with macros and standard editor functionality but still primitive, such as "rename all methods having at least one argument of type SomeType by prefixing their names with "ST_".
12b is a threshold where models start writing coherent prose such Mistral Nemo or Gemma 3 12b.