Yeah. I think it might speed up time to first token but I am not sure how much that matters.

I do enjoy their different personalities when they are tackling "explain this" type puzzles, though.

Gemma writes so well — like a concise code blogger. It makes you understand that the thing we hate about AI slop writing is specifically the cheesy, marketingese sycophantic ChatGPT tone. It's a choice to sound that way.

Qwen writes more tersely by default, like much english language documentation in Chinese open source projects. A couple of lines, code example, fact, code example, line of blurb.

I use this prompt every now and then with a new model. It's obviously a classic SQL puzzle but I've asked new web developers this in the past (prompted by discovering that a client's subcontractor didn't understand it and was therefore unable to migrate some code from relying on dodgy pre-MySQL 5.x behaviours)

—

  I have a MySQL 5 table like this: [id, label, category, score].   It contains a list of items in different categories (text names like cat1, cat2, cat3) with a numerical score. Is there a way I can write a SQL query to find the item in each category that has the highest score, without using a subquery? No two entries in any category share a score.

—

I enjoy seeing what it deduces from the subtext.

Without "thinking" mode on, they always initially fail and you need to prompt them to find the answer. With thinking mode, they both produce really nice explanations.

For me, as an old freelancer who is pretty cynical about vibe coding or "agentic engineering", what I really want is an AI tool that can help me start to solve problems and help me find the right terminology or generate some boilerplate I can tinker with. Both of these models do fine at the kind of "starter" writing that I want when I am trying to untangle an idea.

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