I'm really hoping we're in 2026's 2-month-gap between QwQ and Qwen3 right now

QwQ was genuine next-gen performance usable on local hardware, but the massive required context (it's reasoning style was akin to "if I say every possible word, I'll notice the right one!") kinda made it unusable for agentic coding.

It was ~2 months later that Qwen3-32B came out which delivered QwQ's peaks with usable amounts of reasoning.

I know some people are having a great time with Qwen3.8-27B, and same, but I can't have a good sit-down session with it because the reasoning takes so damn long. Everything I do with it needs to be async or compromise on quality (it's still great when you limit reasoning but definitely loses that next-gen edge). I also have to watch context like a hawk.

Maybe 3.8 is 2026's QwQ and a competitive model requiring less reasoning is just around the corner?