Newbie vibe coding experience: Shifting from Claude Sonnet 4.6 to Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-UD-Q6_K
This is really just a post for those with shallow understanding of all this stuff, those not yet ready or capable of diving into the deeper end of vibe coding/llms. It might not be a helpful post for anyone more advanced than that.
I have been working on a Python Pygame project for about two months. It is now sitting at roughly 30k lines of code across 55 modules. I have been using Visual Studio Code, Copilot Pro+, and around three times the cost of pro+ in additional premium requests per month.
I initially started with Claude Opus, which was brilliant, but it became too expensive. I then moved to Claude Sonnet 4.6, which worked reasonably well at first. But over time I started seeing more and more messages like, “Sorry, the response hit the length limit. Please rephrase your prompt.” It also began struggling to resolve some bugs, even after many prompt attempts.
Generally, the thinking and reasoning periods seemed to get longer without producing useful outcomes, which meant tokens were being spent for very little return. I tried several ways to minimise this, but the same issues kept coming up.
I decided to install Ollama and Cline and use Qwen3.6... which has been going really well. It has already solved a few bugs that Sonnet seemed unable to resolve. I do need to be more mindful with prompts and context window management, but that feels like less of an obstacle than the issues I was having with Sonnet.
When my Copilot Pro+ allowance refreshes, I plan to get Claude Opus to review the code and give me a sense of how well Qwen3.6 has handled things. If the review is positive, I think that may be the end of my Copilot subscription for now.
I also want to acknowledge that before leaving Opus, I used it to modularise the program from one large monolithic Python file into smaller files and modules, with each file responsible for a specific part of the game. I think that made a big difference and helped both Sonnet and Qwen3.6 work much more effectively. For any newbie coders, I do think there is good merit in getting Claude Opus to setup and structure your program initially.
For context, my hardware is probably above average, with a 5090 and a 4000 Pro (56 GB of VRAM) , running a 250k context on Qwen3.6 within Cline.