Qwen3.8-Flash-Next is closer to Haiku than Sonnet in my experience.

Yes I know what the benchmarks say. It does not reflect my experience.

You’re also comparing benchmarks for the full model, but then telling people to run IQ3_S. I found the IQ3_S model to be a substantial step down from 4-6 bit quants.

Compare it to deepseek flash or glm. Those are far more capable and far cheaper. Or compare it to a hosted version of the same model. The math becomes much harder to justify when you compare apples to apples.

If all you do is generate tokens all day, sure, host your own infra. For people that aren’t maxing out hardware, using someone else’s is a pretty economical option. $20 with deepseek flash gets you a LOT of agentic use, and as the frontier moves forward with new models, so do I.