MiniMax-M3.1-Flash vs Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

MiniMax-M3.1-Flash

A 428B mixture-of-experts model, 23B active, for agent work, coding and computer use, with image and video input, about 1M tokens of context and parallel tool calls. It needs a 4 to 8 GPU server for 250 GB of NVFP4 and MXFP8 weights, and vLLM and SGLang support was pre-release on 24 October 2026. Commercial use needs attribution and notice.

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.

MiniMax-M3.1-Flash

1. Check the use case first; commercial products must show "Built with MiniMax M3.1-Flash" and notify MiniMax once, or get written authorisation above $20M yearly revenue
2. On 8 H100 or H200 GPUs use vLLM's nightly image vllm/vllm-openai:minimax-m31-flash with --tensor-parallel-size 8 --block-size 128 --kv-cache-dtype fp8 --moe-backend marlin --max-model-len 262144
3. Pass --reasoning-parser minimax_m3 --tool-call-parser minimax_m3 --enable-auto-tool-choice in vLLM, or minimax-m3 for both in SGLang with --trust-remote-code
4. --block-size 128 is mandatory in vLLM, since MSA's sparse block size is 128
5. Set effort per request with chat_template_kwargs reasoning_effort (low, medium, high, xhigh, max); sample at temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95
6. On Blackwell or MI355X, 4 GPUs serve it with the DSpark draft from dspark/; vLLM's Hopper command leaves DSpark off and turns video input off
7. For GGUF builds by others, use llama.cpp b11861 or later; earlier builds mis-scale the NVFP4 experts and produce garbage
8. Without the hardware, call MiniMax-M3.1-Flash on MiniMax's API (minimax-api), whose thinking defaults to max effort

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