A few of you pointed out in my last post that comparing Flash-Next and Opus with different harnesses and effort levels wasn't fair. So here is a more controlled comparison. Same task for every run: a real feature from the LlamaStash roadmap (save llama-server's KV cache before an unload and restore it when the model comes back). Six combinations, each run twice, so 12 PRs. Flash-Next ran locally on my Strix Halo laptop (Flow Z13) via Halogen. Opus 5.5, Flash-Next, and Kimi K3 scored every PR on seven review questions plus CI. Combination Score (of 8) Time API cost Tokens (in / cached / out) Claude Code + Opus 5.5, xhigh 6.94 (87%) 43.5 min $17.78 507k / 48.3M / 203k Claude Code + Opus 5.5, medium 6.25 (78%) 23.4 min $6.52 242k / 13.4M / 95k Claude Code + Flash-Next, medium 5.5 (69%) 45.3 min $0.32 445k / 13.5M / 82k Pi + Flash-Next, xhigh 5.44 (68%) 63.8 min $0.67 316k / 35.0M / 134k Claude Code + Flash-Next, xhigh 5.38 (67%) 49.5 min $0.39 269k / 18.9M / 99k Pi + Flash-Next, medium 5.06 (63%) 48.1 min $0.56 242k / 29.1M / 117k Scores are the average of both runs. Time, cost and tokens are from the second run, where the 100k-token benchmark numbers were given in the prompt. Flash-Next cost is at the QwenCloud price for Qwen3.8-Flash; I ran it locally, so it cost me only electricity. TL;DR All 12 runs finished and all 12 PRs pass the end-to-end test. Opus wrote better code, 82% on average against 68% for Claude Code + Flash-Next and 66% for Pi + Flash-Next. The difference is in edge cases, tests and docs. The core feature works fine. The gap between Opus and Qwen is not that wide. Flash-Next took 1.1x to 2.1x as long as Opus at the same effort. With Flash-Next, Claude Code and Pi scored the same on the review questions. CI passed on 4 of 4 Claude Code PRs and 1 of 4 Pi PRs. xhigh helped Opus a bit at 2.7x the cost. For Flash-Next, medium and xhigh scored about the same, and medium was faster in all 4 pairs. Opus is still ahead, but Flash-Next was right behind, on my laptop, for the cost of electricity. Full write-up with the detailed methodology and the per-run results and what each model missed: https://deepu.tech/qwen3.8-flash-next-vs-claude-opus-showdown All 12 PRs are public if you want to read the code: https://github.com/deepu105/llamastash-b4r2/pulls   submitted by   /u/deepu105 [link]   [comments]