alt Hacker NewsGiven how little claude usage they've been giving us on the "pro" plan lately, I've started doing more with the various open Qwen3.* models. Both Qwen3-coder-next and Qwen3.5-27b have been giving me good results and their 3.6 models are starting to be released. I think Anthropic may be shooting themselves in the foot here as more people start moving to local models due to costs and/or availability. Are the Qwen models as good as Claude right now? No. But they're getting close to as good as Claude sonnet was 9 months to a year ago (prior to 4.5, around 4.0). If I need some complex planning I save that for claude and have the Qwen models do the implementation.
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I've also been using the Qwen3.5-27B and the new Qwen3.6 locally, both at Q6. I don't agree that they're as good as pre-Opus Claude. I really like how much they can do on my local hardware, but we have a long way to go before we reach parity with even the pre-Opus Claude in my opinion.
Why don’t you do the planning yourself? It’s very likely to be a better plan.
I was thinking the exact same thing just now as I load up qwen3.6 into hermes agent and all while fantasizing that it will replace opus 4.7. It might not actually but seems like we're on the verge of that.
Lately I've been wondering too just how large these proprietary "ultra powerful frontier models" really are. It wouldn't shock me if the default models aren't actually just some kind of crazy MoE thing with only a very small number of active params but a huge pool of experts to draw from for world knowledge.