I gave Qwen 3.8 27B a reverse-engineering job I assumed needed a frontier model, and it finished in 30 minutes

It was the kind of thing you could do painstakingly by hand with the likes of Ghidra.

You can give the model access to a tool like ghidra via a MCP and it will probably be able to solve the problem quicker and (if you ask it) you will get an annotated ghidra project out at the end.

Without it, it will likely write a series of python scripts using capstone etc.

But yes, local models are good. I just wish I could afford the hardware to run them.