alt Hacker NewsThe challenge is token speed. I did some local coding yesterday with qwen3.6 35b and getting 10-40 tokens per second means that the wall time is much longer. 20 tokens per second is a bit over a thousand tokens per minute, which is slower than the the experience you get with Claude Code or the opus models.
Slower and worse is still useful, but not as good in two important dimensions.
Also benchmark measures are not empirical experience measures and are well gamed. As other commenters have said the actual observed behavior is inferior, so it’s not just speed.
It’s ludicrous to believe a small parameter count model will out perform a well made high parameter count model. That’s just magical thinking. We’ve not empirically observed any flattening of the scaling laws, and there’s no reason to believe the scrappy and smart qwen team has discovered P=NP, FTL, or the magical non linear parameter count scaling model.