Laguna S 2.1 vs ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)

Laguna S 2.1

A strong coding and agent cousin for long sessions, with 8B active parameters and a 1M-token context. At 4-bit it needs a 96 to 128 GB machine, tight on a 128 GB one. The main risks are that nobody at Poolside answers its many reports, there are no safety results, and a build card misdescribes its file.

ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)

A Qwen3.8-27B with shorter reasoning, for agent work where thinking tokens cost time, and BottleCap's 4-bit GGUF runs in about 19 GB. The main limits are the licence, which needs a paid licence above 100 people or 1,000,000 USD revenue, a gated main repository, and no safety results or training-data description.

Laguna S 2.1

1. Quickest start is ollama run laguna-s-2.1, 96 GB for the default Q4_K_M, or the 66 GB nvfp4 tag on Apple Silicon
2. On our reference machine try llama-server -hf poolside/Laguna-S-2.1-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 65536, from a llama.cpp release with the laguna architecture (b11772 has it). The 96 GB file leaves little room for context in 107.4 GB
3. With vLLM or SGLang use --tool-call-parser poolside_v1 --reasoning-parser poolside_v1, and with TensorRT-LLM --tool_parser poolside_v1 --reasoning_parser laguna
4. Thinking is on by default in the template, pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false to turn it off, and keep reasoning_content from earlier turns
5. The GGUFs ship set to 262,144 tokens. For 1M with llama.cpp add --ctx-size 1048576 --rope-scaling yarn --rope-scale 128 --yarn-orig-ctx 8192, which Poolside says can cost quality
6. Sampling per the generation config is temperature 1.0 and top_k 20, and Poolside suggests temperature 0.7 and top_p 0.95 at 1M
7. Expect occasional tool-schema slips in harnesses unlike Poolside's own, and validate JSON arguments, which Poolside lists as known limitations

ThinkingCap (Qwen3.8 27B)

1. Check the licence first, an organisation with 100 or more people or 1,000,000 USD (2019) revenue needs a commercial licence from BottleCap
2. For files without the gate use llama-server -hf bottlecapai/ThinkingCap-Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja, about 17.4 GB
3. On vLLM use --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_xml, and on SGLang --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder
4. Set reasoning_effort (xhigh, medium or low) in chat_template_kwargs, any other value makes the template raise an error
5. Keep the base's sampling (temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95, top_k 20), the GGUF card says greedy decoding can loop
6. The GGUFs carry an MTP head, and llama.cpp builds without MTP support for this architecture may refuse to load them with a missing blk.64 tensor