Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving

The way to develop in this space seems to be to give away free stuff, get your name out there, then make everything proprietary. I hope they still continue releasing open weights. The day no one releases open weights is a sad day for humanity. Normal people won’t own their own compute if that ever happens.

The fun thing is, you can be aware of the entire range of Qwen models that are available for local running, but not at all about their cloud models.

I knew of all the 3.5’s and the one 3.6, but only now heard about the Plus.

Nowadays, I'm working on a realtime path tracer where you need proper understanding of microfacet reflection models, PDFs, (multiple) importance sampling, ReSTIR, etc.. Saying that mine is a somewhat unique specific use case.

And I've using Claude, Gemini, GLM, Qwen to double check my math, my code and to get practical information to make my path tracer more efficient. Claude and Gemini failed me more than a couple of times with wrong, misleading and unnecessary information but on the other hand Qwen always gave me proper, practical and correct information. I’ve almost stopped using Claude and Gemini to not to waste my time anymore.

Claude code may shine developing web applications, backends and simple games. But it's definitely not for me. And this is the story of my specific use case.

With them comparing to Opus 4.5, I find it hard to take some of these in good faith. Opus 4.7 is new, so I don't expect that, but Opus 4.6 has been out for quite some time.

Everybody's out here chasing SOTA, meanwhile I'm getting all my coding done with MiniMax M2.5 in multiple parallel sessions for $10/month and never running into limits.

I find it odd that none of OpenAI models was used in comparison, but used Z GLM 5.1. Is Z (GLM 5.1) really that good? It is crushing Opus 4.5 in these benchmarks, if that is true, I would have expected to read many articles on HN on how people flocked CC and Codex to use it.

I am trying since one week to subscribe Alibaba Coding Plan (to use Qwen 3.6 Plus) but it's always out of stock.

They brag about Qwen but don't let people use it.