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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

#571

Post by dnnehgf »

gtirloni wrote: post #490
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…

> 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.

he is the real world. he is telling you that it is the case. when will you people wake up. this shit is real and happening. people who would have reached out to you asking for help are now not doing that. people to whom you would otherwise have gone for help are no longer hearing from you or never met you in the first place.

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

#572

Post by dgellow »

AbsurdCensor wrote: post #465
ahartmetz wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took me about three hours total to set up a local model. I already have a GPU and I have fiber for the download. llama.cpp is not difficult to compile and has many backends. It can run parts of the model on different backends, like in the common case that the GPU doesn't have enough VRAM for everything. There are many step-by-step guides available.

Takes even less depending on your system. LM Studio or Lemonade and you are set up in minutes and now they can even tell you what models will fit with the memory you have.

And it would be in seconds if models weren’t that large and slow-ish to download! LM studio is such a noob friendly experience, pretty neat first experience!

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

#573

Post by [deleted] »

thecopy wrote: post #263
sparkling wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? OpenRouter shows DeepInfra being cheaper than DeepSeek directly https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-20260731#pr...

I agree with parent. OpenRouter might be cheaper list-price, but i have been using 10$ on DS platform since April/May, still have 2$ left. Using OpenRouter i depleted the same dollar-amount in a 1-2 weeks with same usage pattern. No idea why.

[deleted]

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

#575

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#576

Post by entrepy123 »

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…

Suppose I wanted you or someone else on Upwork or Fiverr to port a Rails 4 app to Rails 8 (or React or HTMX or anything up to date and maintainable).

Assume the business logic and all edge cases work in the legacy app. The app is "done", just too old to work on or run on modern hosts. Hence the project.

Would/could you use AI to deliver the project at 10x the speed? Or at 1/10 the price? Or charge the same amount as ever?

I have a feeling the lowest-cost developers on freelance marketplaces are not very good at using the AI tools (and whatever related acumen) and need a lot of hand-holding, the same amount of effort almost as if I decided to guide AI to do it myself.

IMO, there's value you can sell in being someone that (even developers) can hand off a project to, to do end to end, if it's fully specified. Even though the buyer could do it themselves, the developer would be taking on managing it and having AI do it until it's correct, and all the little things, few as they may be.

AI should be giving contract developers superpowers. If it's not, then the limited set of contractors with the AI superpowers will be able to charge 10x as much for their time, and the actual cost of the project remains the same even if it's done 10x as fast/easily.

Curious if you see/feel this, or if there's a marketplace for "please vibe code this for me, make sure it works and is what I want".

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

#577

Post by jiggawatts »

gpugreg wrote: post #411
accrual wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Filelight / ncdu are my friends for finding random 30GB directories containing cached models.

Personally, I prefer QDirStat. I just tried to use FileLight to compare, but the package seems to be broken on Lubuntu.

You two have just listed several tools needs to clean up after another tool: not a strong argument for “simpler”.

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

#578

Post by jiggawatts »

ahartmetz wrote: post #266
jiggawatts wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the diametric opposite of the rent-vs-buy scenario that this entails. Local: You need to invest $thousands into GPU and/or very-high-end CPU+Memory hardware. Vendor: You can use any existing device, even a phone or tablet. A very low-end laptop is fine. > takes literal minutes to get started Local: Typical scenario is hours just to download the software, the model weights, and then faffing around with CUDA an…

It took me about three hours total to set up a local model. I already have a GPU and I have fiber for the download. llama.cpp is not difficult to compile and has many backends. It can run parts of the model on different backends, like in the common case that the GPU doesn't have enough VRAM for everything. There are many step-by-step guides available.

Three hours is a lot longer than one minute.

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

#579

Post by jiggawatts »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #458
jiggawatts wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the diametric opposite of the rent-vs-buy scenario that this entails. Local: You need to invest $thousands into GPU and/or very-high-end CPU+Memory hardware. Vendor: You can use any existing device, even a phone or tablet. A very low-end laptop is fine. > takes literal minutes to get started Local: Typical scenario is hours just to download the software, the model weights, and then faffing around with CUDA an…

> Local: Typical scenario is hours just to download the software, the model weights, and then faffing around with CUDA and matching your GPU drivers. Download LM studio, search models, click download, wait minutes, prompt and have fun

“If you have the prerequisite hardware, then… know which model you want out of thousands of a variants… and your drivers are up to date, then it is fast!”

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

#580

Post by kertoip_1 »

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…

The actual moat is the same as in web services - data and user base.

Why is Google a monopoly? Do they have so advanced software that no one can outperform? I doubt it. What they have is a giant user base that generate loads of real-time data, which make Google services more accurate.

So how AI company can build a moat? Exactly the same way: by making a giant user base produce loads of real time data. Just imagine a service that will generate answers not only based on data they were trained on, but on all data from all user conversations. Imagine being at a concert, looking for a certain type of beer and instantly receiving an answer from an AI assistant about that only because some other guy in a crowd looking for exactly the same thing said to his agent "ah, here they are!".

It is not happening just yet because of making it secure and private is not yet solved, but it's just a matter of time I think.

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