I have the same Mac M4 16gb. Do you have the Qwen model assist the larger models for menial tasks/tool calls during coding it can handle? As in have them work in tandem to save on tokens/calls on the large models or are your local agents just meant for their own specific side tasks?
A mix of both. I have been experimenting building agents that focus on small/tiny LLMs. For example, I built a web-app prototyping harness which used Qwen 4/9B models but separate agents (tool calls, prompts and actual code to parse) for CSS management, TSX management, Router, state, etc. It used SolidJS only.
There was a task manager which was given context of the tech stack so it could split the incoming requests. Then branch out the tasks to appropriate agents. Combine the generated code - this was a file/module/import manager.
The other way is let tiny models (again I would use agents for different use cases) do the busy work - tool calling, finding evidence, etc. I usually setup agents to re-write tool call history and create fresh API requests without using multi-turn chat with tool call history.