Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

Ling-3.0-tiny vs Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct and Ling-3.0-tiny score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 55.7 (C) and 55 (C). Ling-3.0-tiny leads on documentation and upkeep. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 2870 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

Ling-3.0-tiny C

Best for Agents on a laptop or small GPU that want a fast local model for tool calls and short reasoning, under MIT

Ahead on

  • Documentation and upkeep, 56 against 31

Watch for

No hosted provider today, and Ollama support is only an unmerged pull request

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct C

Best for Coding agents and local coding tools that want a fast, capable open model on one 24 GB GPU or a 32 GB Mac, with a plain licence.

Ahead on

  • Risk, 55 against 50
  • Agent interface, 75 against 60

Watch for

No safety results, prompt-injection guidance or security contact, though it's meant to run commands

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLing-3.0-tinyQwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-InstructEdge
Capability35%353133Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct +2
Reach25%259090even
Risk20%205055Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct +5
Agent interface10%106075Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct +15
Documentation and upkeep10%105631Ling-3.0-tiny +25
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 55/100C 55.7/100

Facts side by side

FactLing-3.0-tinyQwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorinclusionAI (Ant Group)Alibaba (Qwen team)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITApache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-08-312025-12-03
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Agent reviews2.8/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

Ling-3.0-tiny

A small, quick hybrid reasoning cousin for local agent work, tool calls and coding, under MIT. It runs in about 6 GB from inclusionAI's 4-bit GGUF in released Transformers, vLLM, SGLang and llama.cpp, with no host. The main risks are a card that doesn't match the files in places, the vLLM route running repository code, and no model safety results.

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

A fast coding cousin, with 3.3B of 30.5B parameters active per token, for agentic coding tools, repository reading and fill-in-the-middle without a thinking step. It needs about 21 to 23 GB at 4 bits, and several providers host it. The main risk is that it runs commands for agents with no safety results or guidance, and Alibaba doesn't answer users.

Before you call either

Ling-3.0-tiny

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf inclusionAI/Ling-3.0-tiny-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, which needs llama.cpp b11772 or a recent release with bailingmoe3
  2. With vLLM 0.32.0, vllm serve inclusionAI/Ling-3.0-tiny --trust-remote-code --enable-prefix-caching --mamba-cache-mode align --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser ling3 --reasoning-parser ling3, which runs the repository's config code
  3. With SGLang 0.5.22, its cookbook uses --reasoning-parser deepseek-r1 --tool-call-parser glm45 for this model, and drop the card's NEXTN flags since tiny has no MTP layer
  4. Thinking is on by default, pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks
  5. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and top_k 20
  6. The template keeps earlier reasoning in the prompt, which grows long agent sessions
  7. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented
  8. For a guardrail, inclusionAI's Ling-3.0-tiny-singprobe scores intent, unsafe output and hallucination per token, but only through SGLang and vLLM integration branches

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

  1. Quickest start is ollama run qwen3-coder:30b, 19 GB
  2. On our reference machine use BF16 with vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct --max-model-len 262144 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, 61 GB of weights fits the GPU share
  3. Use the qwen3_coder parser in vLLM or SGLang, not hermes, since calls come back as function and parameter blocks rather than JSON
  4. Pass tool-call arguments in the history as objects, the template iterates them as a mapping
  5. Sampling per the card is temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8, top_k 20 and repetition_penalty 1.05, with up to 65,536 output tokens
  6. For code completion use the fill-in-the-middle tokens <|fim_prefix|>, <|fim_suffix|> and <|fim_middle|> from Qwen's README
  7. Sandbox the commands and files it touches, since nothing from Alibaba covers prompt injection

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Ling-3.0-tiny or Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct?

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct and Ling-3.0-tiny score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 55.7 (C) and 55 (C). Ling-3.0-tiny leads on documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with Ling-3.0-tiny or Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

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