Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

qwen.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 652 posts

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

#511

Post by qlte »

aleksandrm wrote: post #496
throwaw12 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qwen3.8-Max is the first in Qwen-Max series to be open-weight as well. Kimi K3, GLM 5.2 and now Qwen3.8-Max - open weight models. DeepSeek V4 Flash outperforming Gemini 3.1 pro, probably DeepSeek V4 Pro update is also coming soon Chinese labs are cooking very hard. US closed weight labs are probably hard time to resist not calling Washington DC for more AI regulations

US AI companies are already sweating and 100% pressuring the Trump administration for more anti-Chinese regulation, since there have already been talk of Trump considering banning Chinese models. There's however another push back from the startup industry urging them not to ban it, since it will stifle the innovation. In other recent news OpenAI also greatly cut their model prices, 20% for 5.6 Terra and 80% for 5.6 L…

  > In other recent news OpenAI also greatly cut their model prices, 20% for 5.6 Terra and 80% for 5.6 Luna, to stay competitive.
I’ve seen comments on HN saying how bad this is for the Chinese model developers since the cheaper option like Deepseek Flash are not longer as price competitive to justify the hassle/risk/lack of multimodal… but isn’t this a gigantic red flag for OpenAI/Anthropic at their current valuations?

Sure, it’s just the lowest end for now, and the enterprise money is at the top of the market. And there’s protectionism/enterprise lock-in/etc that complicate things somewhat.

But still, if the US AI labs ever tap the training brakes for a millisecond, the “inference is still a money maker” argument seems to evaporate when they’ll immediately have to fight a race to the bottom until margins are virtually nothing.

Or if the benchmaxing “line goes up” FOMO mindset starts to lose its luster and companies find their individual niches for productive use of AI and stop bothering with all the latest and greatest churn for top dollar.

Which might be even worse if it means the training arms race is still ongoing but neither Anthropic or OpenAI want to be the first to “lose”. While the marginal value of each new model training run keeps decreasing and enterprises signal they’re more concerned with cost reductions than solving ARC-AGI-7 puzzles.

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

#513

Post by cptskippy »

trollbridge wrote: post #149
nozzlegear wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> Qwen-3.6-35B-A3B

The A3B models are super fast but I found the A3B Q4 model ran in circles a lot and ended up taking longer to complete tasks that 27B Q6 because it kept having to redo/rethink/fix something.

I was writing extensive prompts to rein it in and it would still ignore basic directives like "never force push on the repo, ask me instead". I ended up switching back to 27B after about a week of frustration and lost productivity.

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

#514

Post by ATMLOTTOBEER »

msdz wrote: post #328
jcoder wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Which is why big labs have been working hard on making their harness not be stateless any longer: https://earendil.com/posts/session-portability/ “Just take the session thread to another provider” might not be feasible anymore soon-ish.

Ding ding ding

Which is why folks should be jumping to pi / oh my pi as soon as possible

This is also why anthropic no finger lets you use the flat rate sub in non-claude-code harnesses

(They do but you are charged at api rates)

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

#515

Post by ATMLOTTOBEER »

eikenberry wrote: post #509
msdz wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why big labs have been working hard on making their harness not be stateless any longer: https://earendil.com/posts/session-portability/ “Just take the session thread to another provider” might not be feasible anymore soon-ish.

And this is why you should not use the model provider's harness. It is to tight of a coupling of services that's only business purpose is lock-in.

Knower

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

#516

Post by benatkin »

ilaksh wrote: post #471

As someone who is searching for a new programming contract right now, reading all of the incredible abilities here is pretty intimidating. Especially since I get almost all of my projects from Upwork which is an outsourcing site. I believe I am competing directly with these frontier models in some circumstances. Like there are a ton of programmers who previously would be outsourcing work to that site, but now they as…

To say that you're building agents, is based on a way of viewing things that isn't at all pervasive. Some might say you're building a customer support chatbot. To talk of building agents as a common activity makes sense if you use LangChain I guess, where its title is "Open Source AI Agent Framework | Build Agents Faster". But for instance, YC just released qm, and in its README it talks about customizing the agent, which is quite a bit different from just casually dropping the phrase "I'm building an agent". https://github.com/yc-software/qm

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

#517

Post by crossroadsguy »

neversupervised wrote: post #489
ilaksh wrote: post #471

As someone who is searching for a new programming contract right now, reading all of the incredible abilities here is pretty intimidating. Especially since I get almost all of my projects from Upwork which is an outsourcing site. I believe I am competing directly with these frontier models in some circumstances. Like there are a ton of programmers who previously would be outsourcing work to that site, but now they as…

Im sorry to hear about your situation. Have you blogged about it? I’m curious about how the volume of your type of work has been changing over the past 2-3 years.

That working is as not common as college dropouts becoming successful entrepreneurs. But both become stereotypes. But I know you might also just want to read about it.

PS. Not everyone (in fact the rare few) write as if no one is reading. For most, literally no one ever reads :D

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

#518

Post by AbsurdCensor »

SummSolutions wrote: post #481
AbsurdCensor wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strix Halo as well. Bought it for $1,800 new on sale and shoved an extra 4tb drive into it. Been amazing for local AI. Maybe not the absolute fastest thing (usually around 30t/s depending on the task) but has been awesome for a local AI box that I can solar power.

Nice. Mind sharing the solar side of your setup?

Couple of rack mount batteries and roughly 5kw of solar panels. Feeds into a subpanel so I can flip it when I want a couple rooms of solar on the house, or hook a generator up if needed. Can't power the entire house, but works well for thinks like computers, lighting, etc. And if I want to expand, just throw on more panels, or realistically, just throw on more batteries to store the juice.

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

#519

Post by crossroadsguy »

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…

China has the moat that they are cheap/free/open. The US corps have the moat that the other option is Chinese models. At least for some time.

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

#520

Post by eli »

jychang wrote: post #504
gtirloni wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyway the point is these models are just about capable of doing the entire job of analyzing a small business and building out all the agents and iterating on them with the business owner. If you search for LLM benchmarks focused on real-world tasks, you'll quickly learn this ain't the case. No point in telling business owners about that though, they need to see/learn by themselves.

If only LLM benchmarks could benchmark it in the first day! Still no Artificial Analysis benchmark yet. Or benchmark for Laguna S 2.1 or Meituan models or lots of other models.

According to a few tasks from my little personal coding benchmark it's very good at coding and kinda bad at web design. (Also excellent at "draw me a picture" one-shot prompts, for whatever that's worth)

On a sneaky one that involved parsing MIME headers and dealing with character encodings it did better than Kimi K3 at Max and for 38% lower cost.

Interestingly it seems noticeably better than the qwen3.8-max-preview model they offered just a few weeks ago.

Post reply on HN