I gave Claude's cheapest new model and a local Qwen the same coding jobs, and one of them is clearly the better deal

Anthropic just made its smallest model a lot cheaper this month, so the timing might be a little awkward for anyone who just started running free models locally. I've been relying on Qwen 3.5 for anything coding-adjacent, so paying for a cloud model on top of that only makes sense if it does something a local one can't. Coding tasks seemed like the best way to test it since that's where small models tend to struggle. The usual way to test it is asking each model to build something from scratch, which is fine, but that only covers half of the process people lean on AI for.

First reported by XDA Developers. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.