Live data from Hacker News

Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

gist.github.com

91–100 of 102 posts

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#91
post #3

That writing style might be a tad too tense If I got it correct (appending B from https://stolen-thoughts.com/paper.pdf is essential) they are the authors of the well-known exploit to recover readable CoT from OpenAI and Anthropic models. They use that to find hints of distillation, by running a benchmark with a SotA model, recovering the CoT, then taking the first 1% of the CoT and running the open-source model as i…

Interesting how an agent mimics a human hesitating and trying to avoid doing work: > No. > This is major. > Given time, maybe best to respond explaining can't due to time? but instructions expect actual work. However complexity huge; but as coding agent, need to attempt > Maybe we can cheat ... But user may test and see still single CPU. The smarter AI will be, the better it will be at avoiding doing actual work. Als…

[deleted]

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#92
post #3

That writing style might be a tad too tense If I got it correct (appending B from https://stolen-thoughts.com/paper.pdf is essential) they are the authors of the well-known exploit to recover readable CoT from OpenAI and Anthropic models. They use that to find hints of distillation, by running a benchmark with a SotA model, recovering the CoT, then taking the first 1% of the CoT and running the open-source model as i…

Interesting how an agent mimics a human hesitating and trying to avoid doing work: > No. > This is major. > Given time, maybe best to respond explaining can't due to time? but instructions expect actual work. However complexity huge; but as coding agent, need to attempt > Maybe we can cheat ... But user may test and see still single CPU. The smarter AI will be, the better it will be at avoiding doing actual work. Als…

[deleted]

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#93
post #89
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t use the caveman speak unless reasoning is set to xhigh, in my experience. But I don’t know if it has always been coincidental.

> unless reasoning is set to xhigh That's the default and I'm sure almost everyone else is also using it because other reasoning efforts yield subpar results from what I've seen.

It is the default, which is insane.

I think it is clear that medium reasoning has more 'loopy' results like the older Qwens, but I actually think the low effort results are usually more appropriate.

If you plan to one-shot and vibe code AI slop to meet benchmarks, maybe xhigh makes sense. But if you want a responsive agentic coding assistant it is, to me, quite evidently the wrong choice, especially on modest hardware.

I have seen xhigh radically distract itself with rabbitholes and write considerably worse code than low.

It is my own opinion only, but I think much of the fuss about squeezing Qwen 3.8 27B into small local hardware setups, Macs etc., is a bit misguided.

There's too much focus on its benchmark scores, its one-shot capability, canned demos etc.

For my own needs Muse Glimmer (again on reasoning strength: low) is shaping up to being the more practical agentic tool. It is considerably faster than Qwen at solving real coding tasks.

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#94
post #3

That writing style might be a tad too tense If I got it correct (appending B from https://stolen-thoughts.com/paper.pdf is essential) they are the authors of the well-known exploit to recover readable CoT from OpenAI and Anthropic models. They use that to find hints of distillation, by running a benchmark with a SotA model, recovering the CoT, then taking the first 1% of the CoT and running the open-source model as i…

> That writing style might be a tad too tense

Terse?

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#95
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen plenty of Qwen 3.8 27B's caveman-like "Need doing this & that" thoughts. And on cerebras now I've seen them come real fast!

Do you prompt it to behave this way or what? Because here's the king of CoT I get: > Hmm, but there's a subtlety: does babel-jest + preset-typescript transform the file to CJS by default? No — babel-jest doesn't transform ESM imports to CJS unless @babel/preset-env is configured with modules: commonjs. Without preset-env, import statements stay as ESM in the output, and Jest's CJS runtime would fail with "Cannot use…

I was on unquantized 27B, and also Q8 K XL, same "Need do..." paragraphs. We landed in near but distinct morrasses I guess.

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#97
post #3

That writing style might be a tad too tense If I got it correct (appending B from https://stolen-thoughts.com/paper.pdf is essential) they are the authors of the well-known exploit to recover readable CoT from OpenAI and Anthropic models. They use that to find hints of distillation, by running a benchmark with a SotA model, recovering the CoT, then taking the first 1% of the CoT and running the open-source model as i…

> That writing style might be a tad too tense Terse?

[deleted]

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#98
For a personal project a while ago I peeked at Gemini's reasoning tokens in their coding CLI. I was pretty shocked. It was a bit like discovering Marvin (from Hitchhiker's Guide) was hiding in there all along. There was a lot of concern about my needs, "The user want's us to respond in a simple way...", "The user wants a clean front end...". Under the hood the poor model seemed very anxious to please with a hint of depression. It was a bit sad to see!

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#99
post #93
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unless reasoning is set to xhigh That's the default and I'm sure almost everyone else is also using it because other reasoning efforts yield subpar results from what I've seen.

It is the default, which is insane. I think it is clear that medium reasoning has more 'loopy' results like the older Qwens, but I actually think the low effort results are usually more appropriate. If you plan to one-shot and vibe code AI slop to meet benchmarks, maybe xhigh makes sense. But if you want a responsive agentic coding assistant it is, to me, quite evidently the wrong choice, especially on modest hardwar…

I don't share your opinion:

IMHO, xhigh makes sense if you want a slower Opus4.6 at home. It is able to complete tasks autonomously in a way that I've never seen another local model do.

But yes, for simpler tasks or more hands coding sessions, it's simply not the best model out there as its verbosity makes unbearably slow.

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#100
post #99
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the default, which is insane. I think it is clear that medium reasoning has more 'loopy' results like the older Qwens, but I actually think the low effort results are usually more appropriate. If you plan to one-shot and vibe code AI slop to meet benchmarks, maybe xhigh makes sense. But if you want a responsive agentic coding assistant it is, to me, quite evidently the wrong choice, especially on modest hardwar…

I don't share your opinion: IMHO, xhigh makes sense if you want a slower Opus4.6 at home. It is able to complete tasks autonomously in a way that I've never seen another local model do. But yes, for simpler tasks or more hands coding sessions, it's simply not the best model out there as its verbosity makes unbearably slow.

Not just its verbosity; also its architecture.

Muse Glimmer has some interesting and it seems reasonably daring trade-offs in its architecture (that I wish I understood better) that seem to favour longer agentic “dialogue”, and it is just much more nimble all round, even though it’s a larger model.

Don’t get me wrong, I have spent time speccing out a box that I could use to run Qwen 3.8 27B better, and I am very glad it exists, as I am with the Gemma series. We have really an embarrassment of riches at the 32GB VRAM level already.

I just think maybe Meta have the more appropriate strategy (can’t believe I am saying this) for desktop AI.

Post reply on HN