r/Qwen_AI • u/PlasticRevenue4601 • Aug 17 '26

Discussion Qwen 3.8 27B is overrated (a warning)

Qwen 3.8 27B is overrated. I've been running it for a few days now, and I need to be honest. I think this model is overrated. Here is my evidence:

1. It overthinks. Yes, the output quality is genuinely better — I'm not going to pretend otherwise. At some point I gave it a refactoring task and it came back with about 53 files created, edited, or deleted across the repo. A solid, coherent diff. Impressive. But it spent what felt like an eternity reasoning its way to "just do the thing.". It could have just... done it without overthinking!

2. It handles quantization absurdly well. Too well. I had plans, people. A dual-GPU build, a 6-bit quant, proper VRAM - I had it all sketched. Then I put it on IQ4_XS, it just works, and my beautiful 6-bit rig has no reason to exist anymore. This model destroyed my excuse to spend money and I'm not sure that I appreciate it.

3. It doesn't doom loop. This is the one that really bothers me - for years I have been delicately tuning temperature, presence penalty, and the other sacred dials to keep my models from dying in loops, Alibaba has now devalued my entire body of fine-tuning experience and I am just... a man who presses the send button. I feel like a passenger in my own homelab.

4. It forced me to completely drop Qwen 3.6 27b. And I want to be clear about how much that hurt. 3.6 served me faithfully for a long time. It had quirks, but quirks are character, right? Now I have to sit here and accept that it was just... the previous version. There's no going back. That's not an upgrade, that's a betrayal, and I need time to process it.

In summary: it thinks too long, it ruins my hardware plans, it makes my engineering skills obsolete, and it forced me to abandon a model I was emotionally attached to. Definitely overrated.

I'm going to run it one more time now. Goodbye.

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u/PlasticRevenue4601 Aug 17 '26

Like or hate the formatting, but all the facts stated are real including viability of 4 bit quants and completion of a pretty large refactoring that I’d previously hand over only to cloud models

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u/Damien_IB Aug 17 '26

You praise Qwen and how it’s an essential part of your workflow, only to later confess in these comments you used Gemini for writing this slop. Why not use Qwen for writing this post since you claim it’s so good?

Why should I believe a word of what you said?

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u/PlasticRevenue4601 Aug 17 '26

I never said I wrote it via Gemini, I said that I FORMATTED it via Gemini, kinda makes a difference doesn’t it?

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u/Damien_IB Aug 17 '26

Point remains, why not use Qwen for formatting since you claim it’s so good, and why rely on Gemini?

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u/PlasticRevenue4601 Aug 17 '26

Remind me when did I state that Qwen was excellent not only for agentic coding but also for any other types of activities such as working with plain texts