Even Google still believes in small models for coding.

I've been meaning to post about this. The community has been pretty vocal in criticizing "vibe-coded" projects. I used to think the backlash was the real problem, but I've started getting annoyed by a lot of these posts myself — many are just tiny, hyper-specific tools with minimal impact.

Still, I think the community and mods could create better spaces for sharing actual ideas and innovations so people can build on each other's work. A monthly mega-thread or "top picks" roundup or something like that could help. I firmly believe that good, well-designed code fits the open source collaborative spirit of this community even(specially?) if it's vibe-coded.

That said, vibe coding with local models has huge potential. Even Google is now running hackathons for small models like Gemma 4 31B (see thumbnail). This is to celebrate their record inference speeds of 1500 tokens per second, 50–100× faster than what we can do locally, but it's still telling that the big players see real value in small-model AI-assisted software engineering.