# Nemotron 3 Nano

18 Hacker News commenters recommended Nemotron 3 Nano and 5 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Fast open-weight model people find good at tool calling and code reading. Critics say it feels weak on real work.

## Why people recommend it

- Fast responses on local hardware (4 comments): "I have spent about five hours this week experimenting with Nemotron 3 nano for both tool use and code analysis: it is excellent! and fast!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313727)) "It's extremely fast on good hardware, quite smart, and can support up to 1m context with reasonable accuracy" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46306133)) "It is fast and passed all of my personal tool use tests, and did a good job analyzing code." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46296196))
- Good tool calling and tool use (3 comments): "I have spent about five hours this week experimenting with Nemotron 3 nano for both tool use and code analysis: it is excellent! and fast!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313727)) "It is fast and passed all of my personal tool use tests, and did a good job analyzing code." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46296196)) "It is very good with tool calling and works great with Roo Code for local development." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46832562))
- Good at understanding code (3 comments): "I have spent about five hours this week experimenting with Nemotron 3 nano for both tool use and code analysis: it is excellent! and fast!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313727)) "It is fast and passed all of my personal tool use tests, and did a good job analyzing code." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46296196)) "It actually works quite well for general code comprehension across the whole codebase" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460487))
- Runs in about 18GB RAM (2 comments): "running it on my M4 @ 90tps, takes 18GB of RAM." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46296682)) "~18Gb for Nemotron Nano 30b" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46577020))

## What people warn about

- Did not impress on real work (3 comments): "I was not impressed with the latency or the recommended LLM’s quality." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46749810)) "it doesn't really show for the kind of work I throw at it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46680815)) "There was basically no time period for it to shine." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46832805))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Claude Opus](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-opus.md): 3331 recommend
- [OpenAI GPT](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gpt-5-5.md): 1205 recommend
- [Claude Sonnet](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-sonnet.md): 854 recommend
- [DeepSeek V4 Flash](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-v4-flash.md): 828 recommend
- [Fable](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fable.md): 823 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Nemotron 3 Nano", https://hackerapproved.com/p/nemotron-3-nano/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).