Qwen3-Coder: Agentic coding in the world

They don't need to match bigger models, though. They just need to be good enough for a specific task!

This is more obvious when you look at the things language models are best at, like translation. You just don't need a super huge model for translation, and in fact you might sometimes prefer a smaller one because being able to do something in real-time, or being able to run on a mobile device, is more important than marginal accuracy gains for some applications.

I'll also say that due to the hallucination problem, beyond whatever knowledge is required for being more or less coherent and "knowing" what to write in web search queries, I'm not sure I find more "knowledgeable" LLMs very valuable. Even with proprietary SOTA models hosted on someone else's cloud hardware, I basically never want an LLM to answer "off the dome"; IME it's almost always wrong! (Maybe this is less true for others whose work focuses on the absolute most popular libraries and languages, idk.) And if an LLM I use is always going to be consulting documentation at runtime, maybe that knowledge difference isn't quite so vital— summarization is one of those things that seems much, much easier for language models than writing code or "reasoning".

All of that is to say:

Sure, bigger is better! But for some tasks, my needs are still below the ceiling of the capabilities of a smaller model, and that's where I'm focusing on local usage. For now that's mostly language-focused tasks entirely apart from coding (translation, transcription, TTS, maybe summarization). It may also include simple coding tasks today (e.g., fancy auto-complete, "ghost-text" style). I think it's reasonable to hope that it will eventually include more substantial programming tasks— even if larger models are still preferable for more sophisticated tasks (like "vibe coding", maybe).

If I end up having a lot of fun, in a year or two I'll probably try to put together a machine that can indeed run larger models. :)

Is this an effort to chastise the viewpoint advanced? Because his viewpoint makes sense to me: I can run biggish models on my 128GB Macbook but not huge ones-- even 2b quantized ones suck too many resources.

So I run a combination of local stuff and remote stuff depending upon various factors (cost, sensitivity of information, convenience/whether I'm at home, amount of battery left, etc ;)

Yes, bigger models are better, but often smaller is good enough.

I was surprised in the AlphaEvolve paper how much they relied on the flash model because they were optimizing for speed of generating ideas.

Under the hood, the way it works, is that when you have final probabilities, it really doesn't matter if the most likely token is selected with 59% or 75% - in either case it gets selected. If the 59% case gets there with smaller amount of compute, and that holds across the board for the training set, the model will have similar performance.

In theory, it should be possible to narrow down models even smaller to match the performance of big models, because I really doubt that you do need transformers for every single forward pass. There are probably plenty of shortcuts you can take in terms of compute for sets of tokens in the context. For example, coding structure is much more deterministic than natural text, so you probably don't need as much compute to generate accurate code.

You do need a big model first to train a small model though.

As for running huge models locally, its not enough to run them, you need good throughput as well. If you spend $2k on a graphics card, that is way more expensive than realistic usage with a paid API, and slower output as well.

I don't have 10-20k$ to spend on this stuff. Which is about the minimum to run a 480B model, with huge quantisation. And pretty slow because for that price all you get is an old Xeon with a lot of memory or some old nvidia datacenter cards. If you want a good setup it will cost a lot more.

So small models it is. Sure, the bigger models are better but because the improvements come so fast it means I'm only 6 months to a year behind the big ones at any time. Is that worth 20k? For me no.

Very interesting. Any subs or threads you could recommend/link to?

Thanks

I’ve instead used a Gemini via plain ol’ chat, first building a competitive, larger context than Claude can hold then manually bringing detailed plans and patches to Gemini for feedback with excellent results.

I presumed mcp wouldn’t give me the focused results I get from completely controlling Gemini.

And that making CC interface via the MCP would also use up context on that side.

You set the environment variable ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to an OpenAI-compatible endpoint and ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN to the API token for the service.

I used Kimi-K2 on Moonshot [1] with Claude Code with no issues.

There's also Claude Code Router and similar apps for routing CC to a bunch of different models [2].

[1]: https://platform.moonshot.ai/

[2]: https://github.com/musistudio/claude-code-router

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/siz...

I would totally buy a device like this for $10k if it were designed to run Linux.

Or you can rent a newer one for $300/mo on the cloud

If you have 500GB of SSD, llama.cpp does disk offloading -> it'll be slow though less than 1 token / s

Im sure the engineers are doing the best work they can. I just dont think leadership is as interested in making a good product as they are in creating a nice exit down the line

this is disingenous. there are a bunch of hurdles to using open models over closed models and you know them as well as the rest of us.

"Today, we're announcing Qwen3-Coder, our most agentic code model to date. Qwen3-Coder is available in multiple sizes, but we're excited to introduce its most powerful variant first: Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct."

https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct

You won't be out of work creating ggufs anytime soon :)