> The Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct performs comparably to our flagship model Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507, and shows clear advantages in tasks requiring ultra-long context (up to 256K tokens).

This is pretty impressive and a bit like how the GPT-OSS-120B came out and scored pretty well on the benchmarks despite its somewhat limited size.

That said, using LLMs for software dev use cases, I wouldn't call 256K tokens "ultra-long" context, I regularly go over 100K when working on tasks with bigger scope, e.g.:

  Look at the existing code related to this functionality and the existing design patterns in the code as well as the guidelines.
  Then plan out the implementation in detail and ask me a few questions along the way to figure the details out better.
  Finally, based on everything so far, do the actual implementation.
  Then look it over and tell me if anything has been missed from the plan, then refactor the code in any number of ways.

My current setup of running Qwen3 Coder 480B on Cerebras bumps into the 131K token limit. If not for the inference speed there (seriously great) and good enough model quality, I'd probably look more in the direction of Gemini or Claude again.