A 27B tuned on 125,217 human-to-human messages topped r/LocalLLaMA, and the sub's best rebuttal is that a system prompt does the same

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Qwen3.8-27B-Humanlike-Chat, trained on 125,217 obfuscated human messages across 1,396 conversations to strip the assistant register, took the top slot on r/LocalLLaMA at 620 upvotes and 199 comments (12,311 downloads on the GGUF repo). Within hours a 106-upvote counter-post argued you need no fine-tune at all, just a persona, speech samples and a lorebook. The sharpest reply is the one that reconciles both: fine-tuning buys resistance to prompt drift, meaning loss of adherence over long context and under complex prompts, which no amount of system-prompt engineering fixes.