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Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all

qwen.ai

381–390 of 563 posts

Re: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all

#381
post #358
post #270

I've been running this on my laptop with the Unsloth 20.9GB GGUF in LM Studio: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-GGUF/blob/mai... It drew a better pelican riding a bicycle than Opus 4.7 did! https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/16/qwen-beats-opus/

I'm not sure how you can give the flamingo win to Qwen: * It's sitting on the tire, not the seat. * Is that weird white and black thing supposed to be a beak? If so, it's sticking out of the side of its face rather than the center. * The wheel spokes are bizarre. * One of the flamingo's legs doesn't extend to the pedal. * If you look closely at the sunglasses, they're semi-transparent, and the flamingo only has one e…

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Re: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all

#382

Anybody use these instead of codex or claude code? Thoughts in comparison? benchmarks dont really help me so much

In my test case (a feature all models got stuck on a few months ago) it just gets stuck in a thinking loop and never gets anywhere. Not a super amazing test, but it happened a few times in a row, so...

Re: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? 35B-A3B is not nearly as smart as 27B.

One interesting thing about Qwen3 is that looking at the benchmarks, the 35B-A3B models seem to be only a bit worse than the dense 27B ones. This is very different from Gemma 4, where the 26B-A4B model is much worse on several benchmarks (e.g. Codeforces, HLE) than 31B.

> This is very different from Gemma 4, where the 26B-A4B model is much worse on several benchmarks (e.g. Codeforces, HLE) than 31B.

Wouldn't you totally expect that, since 26A4B is lower on both total and active params? The more sensible comparison would pit Qwen 27B against Gemma 31B and Gemma 26A4B against Qwen 35A3B.

Re: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all

#385

Do we know if other models have started detecting and poisoning training/fine tuning that these Chinese models seem to use for alignment, I’d certainly be doing some naughty stuff to keep my moat if I was Anthropic or OpenAI…

They no longer show reasoning traces and are throttling more aggressively.

Re: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all

#386
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can (barely, but sustainably) run Q3.5 397B on my Mac Studio with 256GB unified. It cost $10,000 but that's well within reach for most people who are here, I expect.

$10k is well outside my budget for frivolous computer purchases.

yeah, but if you really really wanted to and/or your livelyhood depended on it, you probably could afford it.

Re: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all

#387
post #385

Do we know if other models have started detecting and poisoning training/fine tuning that these Chinese models seem to use for alignment, I’d certainly be doing some naughty stuff to keep my moat if I was Anthropic or OpenAI…

They no longer show reasoning traces and are throttling more aggressively.

They never showed full reasoning traces, just post-hoc summaries.

Re: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all

#388
post #373
post #270

I've been running this on my laptop with the Unsloth 20.9GB GGUF in LM Studio: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-GGUF/blob/mai... It drew a better pelican riding a bicycle than Opus 4.7 did! https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/16/qwen-beats-opus/

I've been trying the Q4_K_M version, and sometimes it gets stuck in a loop. Gemma 4 doesn’t have this issue.

This has happened before with quantizations and other backends (ones not used by the research lab). Give it a week, download latest versions of everything, and try again.

Re: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all

#389
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can (barely, but sustainably) run Q3.5 397B on my Mac Studio with 256GB unified. It cost $10,000 but that's well within reach for most people who are here, I expect.

$10k is well outside my budget for frivolous computer purchases.

It would be plenty in-budget if the software part of local AI was a bit more full-featured than it is at present. I want stuff like SSD offload for cold expert weights and/or for saved/cached KV-context, dynamic context sizing, NPU use for prefill, distributed inference over the network, etc. etc. to all be things that just work for most users, without them having to set anything up in an overly error-prone way. The system should not just explode when someone tries to run something slightly larger; it should undergo graceful degradation and let them figure out where the reasonable limits are.

Re: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all

#390
post #371
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how the Chinese models often have an unprompted predilection to add flair. GLM-5.1 added a sparkling earring to a north Virginia opossum the other day and I was delighted: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/7/glm-51/

You're running 5.1 locally or hosted?

I used that one via OpenRouter.
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