# Opus and Qwen do a Sokoban > Source: > Published: 2026-11-07 15:56:20+00:00 ## Opus and Qwen do a Sokoban Comparing Claude Opus 5.5 vs Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, running locally, on the same coding task: [Sokoban](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokoban)! In a slightly different setup than usual, I ran Claude Opus 5.5 and Qwen3.8-Flash-Next through the chatbot interface (not a coding agent); Qwen I ran via [llama.app](https://llama.app/) (quantized to [4 bits](https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.8-next) on an AMD Strix Halo machine with 128GB of unified RAM). The prompt was a one-liner: “*Create a simple but beautiful Sokoban game clone in HTML/JS/CSS (all in one file, no frameworks or 3rd-party libraries).*“ Opus (high reasoning effort) took ~4 minutes (I don't have a token count because this was from a web chatbot interface). Qwen took ~31 minutes and 64k tokens. 80% of this was for reasoning (at extra-high effort). Qwen thinks a lot more than Opus! Both are available at [my vibecode benchmarks page](https://senko.net/vibecode-bench/). Here's also a side-by-side playthrough of both: I then had GPT-6 Astra compare the quality of the implementations. I chose Astra so as to not have any bias towards a solution (in case models really do prefer their own). Across 30 different areas/aspects of each solution, Opus scored 77% and Qwen 70% (100% would be a perfect implementation without downsides or bugs). Astra concluded the code review with: “*Claude’s implementation has a modest but meaningful advantage in correctness and maintainability, with simpler state management, stronger movement safeguards, and fewer consequential bugs.*“ Note that this test compared the best frontier model for coding against something I ran completely locally, on a machine sitting next to me. As I wrote earlier this year, [open-weights models have become good enough](https://blog.senko.net/open-weights-ai-models-have-become-good-enough), but it's hard (and expensive) to run a very capable model locally. For this test I chose Sokoban because, frankly, my usual “frontier” tests, RTS/Warcraft, Minecraft and a flying simulator, were beyond Qwen's reach for a zero-shot. When trying to build an RTS, the model took hours and produced an unusable mess. The hardware cost for this setup can vary between $3.5k and $6k, depending on luck, availability, and other system components. Not cheap, but not beyond the budget for a small business or affluent techies. The same amount of money does buy you a few years of Claude Max subscription—purely on that level, it's not easy to justify. But while I will not be canceling my Claude subscription any time soon, I'd say that for smaller tasks and with more guided steering, this is a usable alternative for those who would prefer to—or must—use local models.