Running Qwen3.6 35B MoE on Just 8GB VRAM — Here's the Config That Actually Works (Plus a Sneaky max_tokens Bug I Found)

I got Qwen3.6-35B-A3B running smoothly on a laptop RTX 4060 with only 8GB VRAM—here's how. Fair warning: this isn't for casual chatting. I'm using it as a coding AI agent inside a larger pipeline, so some of my setup choices are tailored to that specific workflow. The real gotcha I hit? Unlimited thinking mode was silently eating up my entire max_tokens budget instead of crashing. Disabling thinking solved it, but there's a smarter fix using per-token limits. If you're trying to squeeze a powerful model onto modest hardware for specialized tasks, this breakdown should save you hours of debugging.