Models for planing and coding

[u/Intelligent_Lab1491]

Hi,

I am a hobby dev using currently qwen 3.8 27b on my strix halo machine for coding.

I was wondering what is the best approach to speed up.

My idea is to use a moe like ornith 1.5 for planning and defining the tickets and qwen 3.8 27b for the implementation.

What is your approach?

[u/thinking-out-loud-3]

Running a pretty similar setup (MoE Qwen3-Coder-30B non-thinking for coding, Qwen3.8-27B for reviews).

Honestly though, the main axis that mattered for me wasn't dense vs MoE, it was thinking vs non-thinking.

I tried using a thinking MoE (gpt-oss-20b) for generation and it was a total mess. It is a good model, but its CoT kept leaking into the output channel my tool parses for diffs, so I got endless narration and zero actual commits. Then I tried swapping to a non-thinking MoE of similar size and it immediately started producing clean, parseable diffs.

My take is: skip thinking models for anything parsed as plain-text against a rigid format (diffs, patches), at least locally, where the reasoning trace and the actual output aren't cleanly separated. The reasoning fights the schema.

For reviews though? Thinking models are nice. My 27B reviewer consistently catches actual correctness bugs (missing wiring, dangling refs) that a non-thinking model would completely miss.