Distilled Qwen 3.5 27B Model Shows Strong Performance with Cursor AI Coding Agent

Model Performance with Cursor

A Reddit user on r/LocalLLaMA shared their experience using the opus 4.6 distilled version of Qwen 27B as the model that drives Cursor, an AI coding assistant. They described the model as "shockingly good" and rated its capability at "Gemini 3 Flash levels."

The user noted that this is the first time they've felt an open model was worth using for regular development work, citing "super solid" performance. They specifically mentioned that Cursor's Plan mode, Agent mode, and Ask mode all work well out of the box with this model.

Setup Process

According to the source, setup took approximately 10 minutes. The user had Cursor handle the configuration work to set up both the ngrok tunnel and localllama infrastructure needed to run the model locally.

The combination of Cursor's harnesses with this distilled Qwen model creates what the user describes as "a really powerful coding combo." They recommend trying it based on their positive experience.