29th June 2026 - Link Blog
Ornith-1.0: Self-Scaffolding LLMs for Agentic Coding. This is an interesting new open weights (MIT licensed) model, the first model release from DeepReinforce.
[...] with variants including 9B Dense, 31B Dense, 35B MoE, and 397B MoE. Built on top of pretrained Gemma 4 and Qwen 3.5, it achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models of comparable size on coding benchmarks.
As far as I can tell the licenses of those underlying models is compatible with being used in this way - Gemma 4 is Apache 2.0 licensed (and not bound by the janky additional Gemma Terms of Use that afflicted the previous Gemma models) and Qwen 3.5 is Apache 2.0 licensed as well.
I've been running the model using LM Studio and the ornith-1.0-35b-Q4_K_M.gguf (20GB) GGUF, hooked up to Pi. Initial impressions are very good - it seems to be able to run the agent harness over many tool calls in a proficient way.
