In my experience it is almost never productively thinking past that point, just spinning in circles. I also reinject all of the thinking. And there are a few tells that it is getting stuck. I have an optional mode that takes the last few turns and tool calls and shoots it off to DSV4 with a prompt to basically understand where it is at and inject better thinking and or planning. It almost always gets it over relatively difficult humps, but some of the time I don't want things going remote. It might end up with 10-30 cents of DSV4 calls over a hours and the quality improvement is remarkable.
The other thing is I trick it into thinking a web_search tool is a web search but it really just asks DSV4 the prompt. DSV4 is a cheap filter to help prevent prompt injection lol. You can give it other models but DSV4 is my cheap-mode default.
edit: oh! My final 35B A3B tip -- use an extremely simple harness. Pi is good. Pi's default tools almost exactly match what Qwen says they tested the model with (likely meaning that tool set is also what they trained it with or something similar). So, in my experience bigger harnesses don't have a noticeable improve ment on tasks.
It had not occurred to me that you could nudge it to stop thinking with a proxy. Nice idea.
Will favourite your comment and come back to it.
ETA: Incidentally you've helped me put into words the difference between the way Muse Glimmer thinks to the way Qwen thinks. There is a clear sense of urgency in Glimmer's thinking traces.
I really do feel like it’s effective tok / s is way higher because it doesn’t waste them.
I don't really enjoy the way Qwen writes prose, and I find its thinking a bit exhausting, though it clearly writes very good code.
I like the neutral, clear way the Gemma models write, which I sometimes use to get myself a "getting started" document on something I want to understand; it also summarises well. It is neutral, sensible, un-showy. It writes in a way that is fairly close to what I would use for documentation. The 12B and 26B models are also very good for talking about art and photography. Analysing my own photographic work has helped me more than I expected it to.
This model, honestly, has made me smile. It also feels like it is more creative at a given temperature than Gemma. I am trying to motivate myself to do something quite open-ended so I asked it about what other people's considerations might be in my situation, and at the risk of anthropomorphising, the things it has come up with feel like the work of a more curious mind, somehow. More eclectic. I have enjoyed testing it and I really want to test it more, which might help me get over a motivation hump there, too.
(I am also exploring its hard-wired policies by asking it to analyse some studio art nude work I have done; it definitely thinks out loud about its policies in a way I have not seen Gemma do.)
A lot of what I am trying to do with my photography is sort of meta-photography. I am really interested in early photographic history, pictorialism and its opponents etc., but I try to avoid reproduction, so I try not to simulate processes too closely or to use vintage tropes in props and settings, but I use simple, undercorrected lenses and some vintage lenses, to gain some of the visual language.
Finding out that LLMs (including Gemma-4 12B with its built-in image encoder) understands a lot of my references and influences, could recommend me my (still semi-obscure) favourite historical photographer and other photographers who clearly engage in the same work, is amazing. And sometimes it says stuff I had not thought of, which is what I am looking for, since my photographic journey is somewhat lonely.
And that is just sort of brushing past the fact that these things can describe the contents of photographs with an accuracy that you can almost take for granted.