alt Hacker NewsI really hope this doesn't hinder development too much. As Simon says, Qwen3.5 is very impressive.
I've been testing Qwen3.5-35B-A3B over the past couple of days and it's a very impressive model. It's the most capable agentic coding model I've tested at that size by far. I've had it writing Rust and Elixir via the Pi harness and found that it's very capable of handling well defined tasks with minimal steering from me. I tell it to write tests and it writes sane ones ensuring they pass without cheating. It handles the loop of responding to test and compiler errors while pushing towards its goal very well.
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I've been testing the same with some rust, and it's has spent a fair bit of time going through an infinite seeming loop before finally unjamming itself. It seems a little more likely to jam up than some other models I've experimented with.
It's also driving itself crazy with deadpool & deadpool-r2d2 that it chose during planning phase.
That said, it does seem to be doing a very good job in general, the code it has created is mostly sane other than this fuss over the database layer, which I suspect I'll have to intervene on. It's certainly doing a better job than other models I'm able to self-host so far.
I've had even better results using the dense 27B model -- less looping and churning on problems
Are you running it locally with llama.cpp? If so, is it working without any tweaking of the chat template? The tool calls fail for me when using the default chat template, however it seems to work a whole lot better with this: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B/discussions/9#69...
What hardware do you have it running on? Do you feel you could replace the frontier models with it for everyday coding? Would/will you?
What hardware are you running this on?
what's your take between Qwen3.5-35B-A3B and Qwen3-Coder-Next?
I've been playing with 3.5:122b on a GH200 the past few days for rust/react/ts, and while it's clearly sub-Sonnet, with tight descriptions it can get small-medium tasks done OK - as well as Sonnet if the scope is small.
The main quirk I've found is that it has a tendency to decide halfway through following my detailed instructions that it would be "simpler" to just... not do what I asked, and I find it has stripped all the preliminary support infrastructure for the new feature out of the code.