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Comment by cdurth | Hacker News Reader

I can't get 3.8 to exit thinking loops. It will just think and think and think on the most trivial topics. I wanted it to port a speed test powershell script to c#. Claude opus 5 completes it under 60 seconds. I let 3.8 churn about 6 different times for 30+ minutes and it never wrote a single line of code to disk. It wrote lots of lines in thinking.

unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF UD-Q3_K_XL DSH (pi)

Any tips?

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I've found it tends toward long thinking loops even for simple tasks (and any quantization seems to increase their length), but those do exit eventually, unlike with Qwen 3.6.

I use the Unsloth UD_Q2_K_XL GGUF with default parameters, along with that custom template linked elsewhere in the thread, and no K/V cache quantization.

For smaller models, you'll probably find anything below Q4 will need handholding. Check Unsloth's graphs at the different quantisations VS error rates and you'll see why.

Thank you, I know about those. And I'll stick with this quant. Normally I'd be with yout there, but Qwen 3.8 is turning out to be good at self-correcting, and the free memory I can use for extra context is worthwhile.

That sounds like something is off - I'm using UD-Q4_K_XL on pi with xhigh thinking, and unless I'm vastly underestimating the complexity of the script that's the kind of task I would expect to take a couple of minutes (getting ~30t/s decode). What server are you running, and are you using the recommended parameters from qwen/unsloth?

My experience has been that anything less than a 4-bit quant has a tendency to go off the rails. There’s a threshold of coherency that is being crossed somewhere internal to the model I guess.

Try the same prompt with a larger quant (even if it runs very slowly because the model no longer fits in VRAM) & see if Qwen does better - if so, there’s your answer.

set thinking to minimal and use these jinja templates: https://huggingface.co/froggeric/Qwen-Fixed-Chat-Templates

we went from 62% completion to 92% using a claude code harness

3.8 doesn't have a minimal thinking mode, only low, medium and xhigh.

Use Muse Glimmer. It’s good.

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