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

qwen.ai

551–560 of 652 posts

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

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but driving knowledge bases is the poster child use case for me https://github.com/aka-rider/llm-wiki I started with Karpathy's LLM wiki, and did everything he said not to do - downgraded the model to mere tool usage and summarization, and it works great. I am a data hoarder, and finally I can just dump all the content I remotely like, and get something interesting to browse for the price of electricity. Agen…

Love the workflow. Is there an existing way to do this inside Obsidian -- where I have all my knowledge?

SmartConnections but heads up, Connections Pro asks $300/year, or, more for the plugin than for an LLM subscription, more than Microsoft Office for that matter.

https://smartconnections.app

Keep in mind Obsidian is open standard JS plugins... You know what can write open standard JS plugins?

Classic which comes first, LLM or the plugin, though. :-)

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

#552
post #109

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The people involved have been talking about safety long before they had any users or a company. "Concrete Problems in AI Safety" by Dario and another founder was published 2016, anthropic was founded 2021. Among a bunch of other examples, including other founders. If safety is seen as a joke now, it was really seen as a joke back then. The reason they keep shooting themselves in the foot with bad PR is because they t…

I’m sorry, but this do-gooder concept doesn’t jibe with their other actions. For example, swindling their business partners (such as Figma). Filing an unnecessary trademark lawsuit against a customer whose brand predates Anthropic. And for safety? Oh yeah, they literally sell the removal of guardrails in exchange for minimum spend commitments.

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

#553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the benchmark even mean when people are using AI to make real world things that solve real world problems? I see people, and my self making amazing things with AI and fixing old projects and having real world impact at the fraction of the cost it would take me to hire people, or hours spent on my own coding. I have built tools and systems with AI that have allowed me to build windows drivers, android apps,…

What amazing windows drivers have you sold?

Idk about sold. But it’s loaded on all the windows machines in a fairly big company that solves a real world problem.

It allows us to apply custom ACLs to AI agents and the child process spawned by AI agents. Giving us the ability to control what files an AI agent can read or write to, while still being in the calling users context. It allows us to force all ai derived processes to use a transparent MITM proxy so we can then also apply robust access rules to remote host allow or deny access to specific urls and not others. It also allows us to monitor access to windows Credential Manager with rules ti allow specific singed binaries to access some credentials but not others. It give us complete control of what AI agents on windows can see or not see or access.

Windows native sandboxing is lacking. You have some stuff in WSL that completely are broken once you call a windows native app. Or you have app containers which are too restrictive and result in applying expensive file system ACL to all files the app containers would access, which can take hours when dealing with million of files, and would be required to be applied every time you chains your app container (there are some workarounds, for them but they still have a one time cost a long with a fairly flaky maintenance process). You can get the network part done by running commands as a different user but that would result in the same file system ACL nightmare that app containers has.

Result is we get seatbelt level sandboxing in windows native, and can apply dynamic rules like preventing access to .aws folders regardless of the OS level ACLs, using glob rules like */.aws, so we don’t have to be aware of the exact path ahead of time.

It also has registry tree ACLs and, can prevent process and process trees from gaining administrative access, the list of features goes on and on.

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

#554
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,…

Not sure what you are trying to say but thanks for reminding me about qm, it has some cool features.

My MindRoot framework had some of qm's main features awhile ago though. I do try to use it to build solutions by customizing rather than from scratch when possible. But a lot of clients or potential clients don't like that idea even though it's MIT. They want some that has clearly been invented by them as a new programming project.

I actually turned down a project last year from someone who wanted me to start over in LangGraph -- he had already decided on it before he knew about my thing.

The most recent project I have been using MindRoot and building up the voice capabilities so I can now handle voice agents end to end including SIP.

But on that website now I try not to emphasize my framework at all for most proposals. You don't have leverage on Upwork. And also with code generation it isn't a critical point necessarily.

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

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

compute is not a moat, it's a rapidly depreciating physical asset. buying up all the shovels in a gold rush does not give you a moat, it gives you a slight advantage for the time being. someone else will just start making shovels. and the data is clearly available, hence the number of open-weight models.

Isn't a literal "moat" about temporary deterrence? I can imagine makeshift bridges could permanently make the moat useless.

well the boards have been laid across the two shores, and the enemies are now climbing the walls, i guess is what i'm saying. if they had a moat, it's been breached

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

#556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh what? Qwen3.5-35B-A3B runs just fine with maximum context, on an RTX SUPER 12 GB, with offloading of some expert layers to DDR4-3200. Same story on an RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB. MTP is a serious boost to tg. Downloading the model is a simple hf command that HuggingFace's web UI even gives you. llama.cpp is trivial to use, and so is llama-swap, if you want to use other models too. If you don't know what arguments to run i…

Full model or a 4-bit quant? I have a 5090 and I'm not sure whether I should use a quant that fits within the VRAM or a much bigger version where I'd have to offload a lot to 64GB RAM and a beefy CPU (but still a CPU)

I personally run the Q6 quant on my RX 9070 XT (16GB VRAM). On r/LocalLlama there was a post recently as well, which talked about the degradation of different quants (for the 27B version)[0]

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vef79c/quantiz...

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

#557

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…

> 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 a…

We’re using 6bit quants since we have 32GB cards.

Gemma QAT is an honourable mention.

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

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MoE models can use system memory along with a GPU.

and get high token bandwidth?

Not badly so because MoE models(identifiable by "CoolName-xxxB-AxxB" naming scheme) have bunch of branches in the middle that only one out of all gets non-zero values. Each of branches aka "Experts" as well as top/bottom parts are significantly smaller than the whole, and so CPU emulation of CUDA operations mixed with GPU taking as much as possible become not so out of question, unlike for dense models("CoolName-xxxB" without "-AxxB")

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

#559
post #546

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As someone else who is an IT consultant. You need to run away from any client who thinks your primary purpose is to write code. You must run away from the business if YOU think your primary purpose is to write code. You should be able to write code and do it well, But the AIs, and I'm not even talking about the ones on the frontier, have been able to write code faster than I have for quite some time. What you need to…

That's a popular type of AI cope. First, I am aware they have been able to write code for some time. I made my first LLM coding agent experiment the day after ChatGPT first blew up in November 2022. I haven't been a "code monkey" in the last say 15 or 20 years of my programming. I would argue also that code money was never really a thing, it was just an excuse that pretentious overpaid developers used for the existen…

Two points of disagreement:

"Code monkey" absolutely was and still is a thing. I was hired by Big Name Co originally to be staff but a reorg had me do typical senior position duties for around a year, and it was hell. Every decision was made over our heads, feedback was unwelcome because the feature had already gone through design and gotten layers of sign-offs from different areas of the org, etc. My sole purpose was to write code and review peer code. Staying there a full year was way too much.

Second point, requirements analysis is hard because:

* Different stakeholders have conflicting goals, sometimes mutually exclusive * Some stakeholders have ideas that are actively harmful to users, and you must flex political capital to nip it in the bud * Some stakeholders think they know what they want with a far greater degree of clarity than they actually do, and lack the time to sit down and suss out the nuances, because you're a side-show in the grander scheme of their own priorities.

Writing code is a heck of a lot easier than dealing with people at the edges.

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

#560

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.

> they need to see/learn by themselves The cleanup pay is mighty generous as well.

Has anyone gotten a position as a post-vibe janitor yet?
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