I gave Qwen 3.8 27B and Opus 4.8 the same task in the same codebase. They both came up with the same diff. It wasn't a particularly challenging task (removing a feature flag and updating applicable specs), but it was character for character.

Lately I've been throwing tasks at Qwen and a frontier or recently-frontier model (as well as Kimi, GLM, etc) and the smaller parameter models are not really comparable to Opus when it comes to making intelligent decisions about greyer areas of good software architecture.

Amazing results for open weight and that size, but a really long way off, and I'm extremely skeptical of benchmarks that show these smaller models as being anywhere close to Opus 4.8 (or even earlier Opus's).

As a counter to that - I've tried various flavors/quants/full weights and Qwen 3.8 27B has been entirely useless at anything non-trivial. Sure - it can do some boilerplate work (though, even armed with a well written spec and working within a very well known framework it went off the rails and did things in a way that were... um... questionable at best) but I don't see it as anything more than a personal assistant style model. Zero chance I'd "work" with it, I spent days trying to get it to do something for me that was usable that I didn't have to have reviewed and refined by a frontier level model or myself. Couldn't do it. The idea that qwen 3.8 27b is _anywhere near_ Opus 4.8 is laughable. Pure benchmaxxing.

DS4 Flash 0731, on the other hand, wildly opposite experience. Would recommend.

GLM 5.2 - even quanted down to a hybrid 4/3 bit setup is amazing for everything but the hardest/most complex stuff in the same projects/realm.