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Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

qwen.ai

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Re: Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

#371

Post by owebmaster »

me551ah wrote: post #303
regularfry wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With their current API approach they're essentially a commodity. They need to start moving parts of the harness behind the API, otherwise they'll remain a commodity. Recursive self-improvement changes the parameters a bit, especially for the market-leaders, and it's the one thing that makes me wonder if they'll be able to extend their lead faster than the smaller labs can keep up, but it's an option available to ever…

> They need to start moving parts of the harness behind the API This isn't without it's challenges however. 1. This will increase costs drastically, since they would need to a run a sandbox per use to ensure data isolation. 2. Increased latency, and this directly limits how much of the harness can be moved to the cloud before the users notice sluggishness

3. Users can still move to better open harnesses

Re: Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

#373

Post by [deleted] »

enraged_camel wrote: post #348
OtomotO wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You at least need a capable machine, so that's not 0 monetary investment It is 0 monetary investment if I already have said machine lying around doing nothing. Which is exactly the story OP talked about.

But most people don't have an RTX 5090 lying around, so the story doesn't apply to them, right?

[deleted]

Re: Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

#374

Post by w4yai »

varispeed wrote: post #360
me551ah wrote: post #257

This makes me wonder if AI companies even have a MOAT in the first place. All requests to an LLM are idempotent, for every API call you need to send it the entire conversation history so that it can process it. LLMs do not learn or remember anything, which makes it super easy for users to switch LLMs on the fly. Most popular AI frameworks, make this a one-liner change these days. And that makes me wonder if the trill…

From my experience these open source models are nowhere near the performance offered by Fable/Opus/GPT-5.6. Whenever I tried Qwen, Kimi, Deepseek, the results were much worse and it just took much more time to get something usable. When you consider that, the frontier offerings are still much cheaper.

What provider did you use ? Synthetic's Kimi is a beast

Re: Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

#375

Post by jpgvm »

jcoder wrote: post #305
me551ah wrote: post #257

This makes me wonder if AI companies even have a MOAT in the first place. All requests to an LLM are idempotent, for every API call you need to send it the entire conversation history so that it can process it. LLMs do not learn or remember anything, which makes it super easy for users to switch LLMs on the fly. Most popular AI frameworks, make this a one-liner change these days. And that makes me wonder if the trill…

> All requests to an LLM are idempotent, for every API call you need to send it the entire conversation history A more appropriate term is “stateless”. LLM responses are certainly not idempotent, as they are not even deterministic.

They can be deterministic. We did this at Groq, if you sent a request with exactly the same input token, seed and temperature value you would get precisely the same result every time.

This is harder to do on other architectures that themselves aren't fully deterministic though.

Re: Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

#376

Post by topranks »

websap wrote: post #291
badsectoracula wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A local model needs 0 investment and 0 commitment, takes literal minutes to get started (especially if you have someone who is into that stuff showing you the ropes) and if you end up disliking the experience of using AI you can just `rm -fr` it and forget the whole thing existed.

Needs 0 investment and 0 committment? - You at least need a capable machine, so that's not 0 monetary investment. - You need to spend at least an hour decicding between ollama, llamacp, mlx, etc. - You need to find the correct quantized version of the model that works for you based on the architecture. - You need to figure out the correct context window size to get reasonable performance. - You need to setup a harnes…

You might be anti-ai in the sense you aren’t comfortable with all your data being shipped back and forth to a third party.

Re: Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

#377

Post by cpburns2009 »

websap wrote: post #216
trollbridge wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qwen-3.6-35B-A3B was our "gateway drug" into switching our organisation to agent/harness-first coding. Particularly, I had one team member who was extremely sceptical of AIs/LLMs/harnesses and refused to use them. One day he said "Well, I have an RTX 5090 doing nothing... should I try to get something up on it?" and a few minutes later he had 3.6-35B loaded up, running OpenCode. It continues to be a workhorse to this…

[flagged]

This largely describes me. I'm skeptical of AI in that it's capabilities, while very impressive, are vastly oversold and overblown. Being skeptical of AI is not being "Anti-AI". That's largely the AI data centers are using up all the water and electricity types.

Re: Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

#378

Post by DoctorOetker »

cowboy_henk wrote: post #194
aianus wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The percentage of the population that needs to work will continue to go down because of aging and automation although you might not see it as a reduction of hours for a given individual employed person. Already 38% of Americans aged 16 or older do not work and are not looking for work and yet are not dying from hunger or exposure. This would have seemed like a utopian dream to someone from the 1800s.

In the 1800s most families only had a single provider, so this percentage may have been higher back then than it is now.

the single providers were the children in the factories?

Re: Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

#380

Post by btbuildem »

nozzlegear wrote: post #27
toshinoriyagi wrote: post #8

They've also announced Qwen3.8-27B being released open-weight next week. Qwen3.6-27B is widely regarded as one of the best local models, especially since nothing else comes close to it, that isn't benchmaxxed, without being significantly larger. If 3.8 truly improves upon it that would be awesome.

Qwen3.6-35B is my daily driver for AI, and what convinced me to cancel my Claude subscription back in April. The Qwen3.6 line is easily the best local model I've tried, and I've tried a lot. I've got it diligently grinding away on my laptop right now, reviewing and fixing some bugs in my F# code.

I'm on the verge over here, the new Anthropic models have been a disappointment. I've tried the A3B variant, but had mixed results. What do you use as the coding agent, and have you heavily customized your workflows?
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