Three days after Moonshot’s Kimi K3, Alibaba’s Qwen team previewed Qwen3.8-Max-Preview at WAIC in Shanghai — a 2.4-trillion-parameter multimodal flagship with a 1-million-token context window. Alibaba positions it near the top of the frontier stack (their claim: second only to Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5). Independent leaderboards and a full model card are not public yet, so treat the ranking as the vendor’s until third-party numbers land.
If you already use Rope Notes’ agent for Dart, Flutter, or multi-file refactors, you can point a cloud provider at the preview today. Open weights are promised “soon,” with no date or license yet — so local 3.8 Max is not a thing yet.
| Fact | Status |
|---|---|
| Model ID | qwen3.8-max-preview |
| Parameters | 2.4T (Alibaba); activated-parameter count not published |
| Context | 1M tokens (per |
There is no new “Qwen 3.8B” dense twin in this launch. The name is Qwen 3.8 (family version), not an 8-billion-parameter sibling. For on-device work you still use the existing open-weight Qwen3 line (qwen3:8b
and friends via Ollama / llama.cpp) until 3.8 Max weights appear.
Rope Notes is a local-first, IDE-style editor: rope-backed editing, Dart analysis, and an agent that can Chat, Plan, and Execute — with tools, then multi-file edit proposals you accept or reject. A long-context frontier model is useful for the Plan → Execute loop; a local Qwen3 keeps day-to-day work on-device.
| Qwen 3.8 Max strength | How Rope Notes uses it |
|---|---|
| Long-horizon coding + tools | Agent tool loop (read_file , search, definitions, …) over many turns |
| 1M context | Open tabs, @ mentions, plans, and memory stay coherent longer |
| Multimodal input | Screenshot / layout feedback when your session includes image context |
| OpenAI-compatible API | Same Preferences → Agent flow as other cloud backends |
| Open weights later | Same UX once you host weights or a LAN OpenAI-compatible endpoint |
Alibaba markets strong coding and full-stack work relative to Qwen3.7-Max. Until independent scores exist, the practical test is your own Plan/Execute sessions — not launch-day leaderboard claims.
qwen3.8-max-preview
(not general pay-as-you-go at announce time).Open weights, when they land, change the local story. Until then, treat 3.8 Max as a cloud provider in Preferences.
You need a desktop or mobile build with cloud agent backends (web builds do not run the agent).
https://dashscope-intl.aliyuncs.com/compatible-mode/v1
qwen3.8-max-preview
If your Token Plan console shows a dedicated base URL (some Alibaba plans use a plan-specific host), use that URL instead — the model ID stays qwen3.8-max-preview
.
Provider configs live under .rope_notes/preferences.toml
. Share the setup, not the secret keys.
Rope Notes remains Ollama-first on desktop (llama.cpp is also first-class). For offline or source-sovereign sessions:
ollama pull qwen3:8b
Then select the Ollama (local) or llama.cpp (local) provider and the pulled tag. That is the current Qwen3 open line — not Qwen3.8-Max-Preview.
@lib/...
or by dragging from Explorer.plan-*.md
/ checklist under .rope_notes/
.The 1M window helps across long checklists; still prefer targeted @
mentions so turns stay cheaper and sharper.
When Execute proposes changes, Rope Notes surfaces an inline diff review (Accept / Reject per file, or Accept all). The model does not write straight through your buffer — you still own the rope.
A common split:
qwen3:8b
(or similar)qwen3.8-max-preview
Switch providers from the agent panel; no project rewrite required.
On Android, cloud backends work even though local Ollama is a desktop feature. Use session transfer to move buffers and agent artifacts between machines, then keep the same Qwen Cloud provider selected.
Accurate expectations beat marketing:
@
mentions (with LSP diagnostics on those snippets)/remember
), optional cognitive memory hits, active skillslist_directory
, grep
, read_file
, …) for on-demand deeper readsUse @
and Plan artifacts deliberately; a 1M window is not a reason to paste the whole repo by default.
Before long Execute sessions:
.rope_notes/permissions.toml
.git
and secret paths as neededFrontier models are most useful when they cannot touch everything.
qwen3.8-max-preview
qwen3.8-max-preview
)Qwen3.8-Max-Preview is available now as a hosted preview. In Rope Notes it is a Preferences change — and a natural cloud counterpart to the local Qwen3 models you may already run on Ollama.
Rope Notes — a high-performance, local-first editor with a real AI agent, Dart analysis, and optional P2P sync. ropenotes.dev