Round 7 ended on a cliffhanger I couldn't stop thinking about. Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B built the entire feature — read the codebase, wrote the files, got a clean build — and then spent 77 messages, more than half its session, failing to take a Playwright screenshot. It never committed. It never pushed. All that work, gone.
Was that a bad day, or is it structural? Round 9 was supposed to answer that with three contestants: the 35B-A3B running back for a rematch, a dense 27B challenger, and NVIDIA's Nemotron-3-Nano as an architectural wild card. Clean, narrow, three-way test of dense-vs-MoE.
It didn't stay clean. By the time I was done, I'd expanded the field to five models, and I'd personally patched two separate llama.cpp/template bugs live, mid-bakeoff, just to get two of the contestants to a fair starting line. One of those fixes worked perfectly — and the model still failed anyway, for a completely different reason.
Let's get into it.
The Setup
