Gemma 4 26B Outperforms Qwen 80B Coder in Benchmarks

Saw the same flip on my own box -- a smaller generalist edged out the "coding specialist" once I stopped trusting the benchmark suites and tested on my actual task mix. Specialist beats generalist falls apart the second you measure on your real work, not somebody's eval set. And honestly the model size wasnt my problem at all, it was vLLM eating a week in crashes. Stable serving stack beats a bigger model every time.