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Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

qwen.ai

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Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#51

Post by furyofantares »

I'll diverge from some of these comments, I don't find it misleading to compare to Opus 4.5.

I can remember how good Opus 4.5 was. If I'm considering using this, it's most informative to me to compare to the model it's closest to that I have familiarity with.

I'm obviously not switching to this if I want the best model. I'm switching if I'm hopeful that the smaller versions are close to it, or if I want to have more options for providers, or for any other reasons unrelated to getting the highest quality responses possible.

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#52

Post by wongarsu »

cubefox wrote: post #17
Aurornis wrote: post #11

This is their hosted-only model, not an open weight model like they’ve become known for. They got a lot of good publicity for their open weight model releases, which was the goal. The hard part is pivoting from an open weight provider to being considered as a competitor to Claude and ChatGPT. Initial reactions are mostly anger from everyone who didn’t realize that the play along was to give away the smaller models as…

> I think there is a moderately large market for models like this that aren’t quite SOTA level but can be served up much cheaper. There isn't, pretty much everyone wants the best of the best.

For coding I want the best. Both I and $work do lots of things besides coding where smaller models like qwen3.5-27b work great, at much lower cost.

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#53

Post by scottcha »

throwaw12 wrote: post #45

I would love to hear from people using both (Claude Code OR Codex) AND (Qwen) and their experience with Qwen models, are they on par, or how far are they?

I switch between Claude Code (Opus/Sonnet) and Qwen (OpenCode, OpenClaw) multiple times throughout the day and Qwen 3.5 is really nice. I do also use KimiK2.5 and GLM5 pretty often too and I'm starting to get a sense that the agent tool is becoming a little more important than the model with these level of models. As long as tool calling and prompt quality is all configured correctly by the provider.

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#55

Post by thinkcontext »

Someone1234 wrote: post #25
cubefox wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think there is a moderately large market for models like this that aren’t quite SOTA level but can be served up much cheaper. There isn't, pretty much everyone wants the best of the best.

> There isn't, pretty much everyone wants the best of the best. For direct user interaction or coding problems, perhaps. But as API calls get cheaper, it becomes more realistic to use them for completely automated workflows against data-sets, or as sub-agents called from expensive SOTA models. For example, in Claude, using Opus as an orchestrator to call Sonnet sub-agents, is a popular usage "hack." That only gets mo…

> But as API calls get cheaper, it becomes more realistic to use them for completely automated workflows against data-sets

Seems like a huge waste of money and electricity for processes that can be implemented as a traditional deterministic program. One would hope that tools would identify recurrent jobs that can be turned into simple scripts.

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#56

Post by alexsmirnov »

Someone1234 wrote: post #25
cubefox wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think there is a moderately large market for models like this that aren’t quite SOTA level but can be served up much cheaper. There isn't, pretty much everyone wants the best of the best.

> There isn't, pretty much everyone wants the best of the best. For direct user interaction or coding problems, perhaps. But as API calls get cheaper, it becomes more realistic to use them for completely automated workflows against data-sets, or as sub-agents called from expensive SOTA models. For example, in Claude, using Opus as an orchestrator to call Sonnet sub-agents, is a popular usage "hack." That only gets mo…

Exactly.

I did create my own MCP with custom agents that combine several tools into a single one. For example, all WebSearch, WebFetch, Context7 exposed as a single "web research" tool, backed by the cheapest model that passes evaluation. The same for a codebase research

Use it with both Claude and Opencode saves a lot of time and tokens.

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#57

Post by Alifatisk »

I understand peoples reactions of Qwen team comparing against Opus 4.5 instead of 4.6. And them comparing against Gemini Pro 3.0 instead of 3.1. But calling it misleading is a bit of stretch in my eyes, people here are acting like we immediately forgot how previous generations performed just because a new version is released.

This field is going in a incredible pace, the providers release a new model every quarter or so. The amount of criticism is a bit overblown in my opinion. The benchmarks still look very good to me. I’ve used GLM-5 (latest is GLM-5.1) and Kimi K2.5, they are decent and gets the job done, so seeing how this model of Qwen performs compared to it is kinda impressive.

Also, why are so many pointing out the fact that this model is not open-weight as if this is their first time doing so. Qwen-3.5-plus, Qwen-3-Max is also closed source. This is not something new.

I think Qwen trying to catch up to the SOTA models is still healthy for us, the consumers. Sure, its sad news that this version is closed-weight, but I won’t downplay their progress.

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#58

Post by bensyverson »

furyofantares wrote: post #51

I'll diverge from some of these comments, I don't find it misleading to compare to Opus 4.5. I can remember how good Opus 4.5 was. If I'm considering using this, it's most informative to me to compare to the model it's closest to that I have familiarity with. I'm obviously not switching to this if I want the best model. I'm switching if I'm hopeful that the smaller versions are close to it, or if I want to have more…

Exactly this. If you can get something close to Opus 4.5 for free, that's noteworthy. I may not use it for the most critical pieces of my app, but not everything I do is galaxy-brain coding.

Re: Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

#59

Post by thraxil »

cubefox wrote: post #17
Aurornis wrote: post #11

This is their hosted-only model, not an open weight model like they’ve become known for. They got a lot of good publicity for their open weight model releases, which was the goal. The hard part is pivoting from an open weight provider to being considered as a competitor to Claude and ChatGPT. Initial reactions are mostly anger from everyone who didn’t realize that the play along was to give away the smaller models as…

> I think there is a moderately large market for models like this that aren’t quite SOTA level but can be served up much cheaper. There isn't, pretty much everyone wants the best of the best.

No. Right now I'm upset that Google has removed (or at least is in the process of removing) the Gemini 2.0 flash model. We use it for some pretty basic functionality because it's cheap and fast and honestly good enough for what we use it for in that part of our app. We're being forced to "upgrade" to models that are at least 2.5 times as expensive, are slower and, while I'm sure they're better for complex tasks, don't do measurably better than 2.0 flash for what we need. Yay. We've stuck with the GCP/Gemini ecosystem up until now, but this is kind of forcing us to consider other LLM providers.
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