Qwen-3.8-27B is good enough that I stopped using API

Many a praise have been sung on Qwen-3.8, but here is mine.

Qwen-3.8 and I had a rocky start, because it thinks so much. Watching it working is painful, so you have to stop doing that. You have to let it work unsupervised. And that's okay, because it really is able to complete complex refactors on its own, making good decisions along the way. Not perfect, but hey, neither is API.

The model quant is Q4_K_S, context is quantized to Q8_0, which seems to be okay, quality wise. I use the official Qwen. Briefly tried Swift-Qwen, which is indeed faster, but I found it getting trapped in loops, which is very rare in vanilla Qwen.

I am using Qwen-3.8 in the Pi agent without MCP and with the minimum amount of tools. Bash is all you need, but I keep the read, write, and edit tools. The edit tool in Pi is the weakest link, the model often has to retry edits, because it messed up the indentation. I am waiting for someone to come up with a more fault-tolerant edit in Pi. Probably I have to make one myself some day.

As a sandbox I use docker. My Pi agent is running on a Raspberry Pi, which seems fitting.

On my hardware and where I live, 1M tokens cost 2.4 cent (input) and 70 cent (output) which is comparable to the cheapest providers on nano-gpt.com.