I have not tried Flash Next yet; but 27B is a cracking, little model. It is the first small model that I, as someone with 30 years of experience, can finally say is good enough to hand off small and mid-sized tasks and expect a pretty good result.

It is also a competent tool caller when quantised to NVFP4 for use with ninfer; my own harness only reports the occasional hiccup and it is only because the model will sometimes emit tool calling tokens in its reasoning loop.

I prefer https://ornith.ai/ornith_1_5.html to Qwen 3.8 not only because it is much faster on my hardware but better responses.

But this Qwen 3.8 Flash next coder is amazing running with Strata.

Is this true for 27b Q4_K_XL vs flash next IQ3_S? I thought under Q4 models start quickly degrading?

Yeah I agree, I'm running it with Pi didn't notice much difference compared to lower tier models and the speed, of course.