Gemma 4, Qwen 3.5 top 12GB coding picks
Google's Gemma 4 26B and Alibaba's Qwen 3.5-35B have emerged as the dominant choices for local agentic coding on 12GB VRAM cards like the RTX 5070. By leveraging Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures and aggressive quantization, these models provide the reasoning depth required for autonomous IDE agents within consumer hardware constraints.
12GB is the new minimum viable VRAM for reliable agentic work, as 7B-9B models lack the planning depth for complex repository-level refactors. Gemma 4 26B A4B leads in intelligence with its Thinking Mode for multi-step tasks, while Qwen 3.5-35B-A3B excels in speed, delivering over 50 tokens per second on an RTX 5070. MoE architectures are essential for 12GB cards, enabling higher reasoning depth with fast inference. Maintaining usable context windows for codebase analysis requires 4-bit KV Cache and Q4_K_M quantization, as smaller reasoning-distilled models still lack the stability of 20B+ parameter MoE variants.
DISCOVERED
9d ago
2026-04-03
PUBLISHED
9d ago
2026-04-03
RELEVANCE
AUTHOR
RodianXD