> I don't see how anyone justifies a claude subscription.

I have hardware to run Qwen3.8 Flash Next (the model you used in your example) much faster and closer to full quality.

I do not understand how anyone thinks it replaces a $20 Claude subscription in performance or quality. At best I some times have Opus give well defined tasks to Qwen3.8, but I have to be very selective about what is handed over. I also use a lot of Opus tokens reviewing and fixing it.

For real work (not fun projects or experiments) I won’t even bring the Qwen models in to play at all. The gulf between Opus and Qwen3.8-Flash-Next is that big.

So I hope everyone takes comments like this with a huge grain of salt and healthy dose of skepticism. If your work has a high tolerance for slop and you can wait a very long time, the local LLMs can do a lot.

However claims about replacing a Claude subscription with Qwen3.8-Flash-Next? The only way this makes sense is if someone is choosing on ideologies like privacy or avoiding big corporations first, with quality a distant second.

I get downvoted every time I say this, but it’s objectively true. The open models that can be run on consumer hardware are far behind Opus, and quantizing them to Q3 takes them even further behind than the benchmarks show.

Also 100 tok/s prompt processing and 20 tok/sec is painfully slow for real work. The slowness is multiplied by how much extra work the less intelligent models have to do to get tasks done.