Qwen doesn't overuse em-dashes, weird sentence structures with bold text: normal text.

In my private GitHub Repo Qwen finished as much tasks as Fable did. Without hitting 5-hour session limits. Qwen's token-per-second performance fluctuated greatly. From 20 tps up to 80 tps.

Qwen failed on some "reading between the lines", but so did Fable.

The only noticeable difference is skill loading. Until "Must use" in a skills front matter, Qwen tends to be very lightly loading skills. Superpowers works, because of the same Must use wording. All my local skills use the same wording now. For installed Skills, it's more or less my responsibility to remind Qwen using a certain skill.

I used Qwen together with Qwen Code. I didn't compare Qwen+Claude Code.

With my Owl code scanner, Claude and Qwen produced similar results. Qwen repeatedly used the same output format, despite no format provided and disabling memory. Fable varied greatly. Both followed the file format output and produced valid files.

With Qwen 3.8 being now a visual understanding model, I don't really miss Fable/Opus/Sonnet for my private projects.

At work we are still exclusively using Anthropic models with Claude Code. No change incoming on that front.

Privately, I'm sold on Qwen and Qwen Token plan. No session limits, many open weights models available via a single API.

Since it's horrifying thinking about what US companies do with my data, it's no worse or better thinking about what Chinese companies do. It's a choice between the Plague and Cholera.

TL;DR: Qwen3.8-Max-Preview is already good enough that I cancelled my Anthropic subscription. There are other factors too, but Qwen is on a great path.

As a European, this is choosing between the plague and cholera. Trusting US companies is as troubling as trusting Chinese companies. But I get more bang for the buck from the qwencloud.com Token Plan than from any US AI lab.