they're already there ?? https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3.5-27b

Like 4B, 2B, 9B. Supposedly they are surprisingly smart.

Yep. The 9B has excellent image recognition. I showed it a PCB photo and it correctly identified all components and the board type from part numbers and shape. OCR quality was solid. Tool calling with opencode worked without issues, but general coding ability is still far from sonnet-tier. Asked it to add a feature to an existing react app, it couldn't produce an error-free build and fell into a delete-redo loop. Even when I fixed the errors, the UI looked really bad. A more explicit prompt probably would have helped. Opus one-shotted it, same prompt, the component looked exactly as expected.

But I'll be running this locally for note summarization, code review, and OCR. Very coherent for its size.

> Very coherent for its size.

I found them to be less than stellar at writing coherent prose. Qwen 3.5 9b was worse in my tests than Gemma 3 4b.

There are smaller ones on HuggingFace https://huggingface.co/models?other=qwen3_5&sort=least_param... with 0.8B, 2B, 4B and 9B parameters.