Ornith-1.5-9B vs Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

Ornith-1.5-9B

A small coding and terminal-agent cousin with thinking on by default, XML tool calls that vLLM and SGLang parse, and 262,144 tokens of context. Ornith's own 4-bit builds run in under 8 GB in most local runtimes. The main risk is an absent publisher, with no licence file, no safety results, files replaced without a note and no replies.

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

A large mixture-of-experts cousin, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next post-trained to think in fewer tokens, for coding and long agent sessions on a multi-GPU server. Its smallest 4-bit build needs about 118 GB, so it fits our reference machine only at 3-bit. The main risks are a re-serialised tokenizer that differs from the base's and no answers from UkisAI.

Ornith-1.5-9B

1. Start it with ollama run ornith-1.5:9b, or llama-server -hf ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-9B-GGUF with the Q4_K_M file
2. In vLLM pass --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_xml --reasoning-parser qwen3, and in SGLang --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --reasoning-parser qwen3, so tool calls and reasoning come back parsed
3. Thinking is on by default. Send chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention
4. Pin which template your runtime loads, since chat_template.jinja keeps earlier reasoning and the tokenizer_config.json template drops it
5. Use temperature 0.6, top_p 0.95, top_k 20 for coding and temperature 1.0 with presence_penalty 1.5 for general tasks, per the card
6. Pin a revision when you download, since Ornith has replaced files in place, and add mmproj-Ornith-1.5-9B-BF16.gguf (0.9 GB) for image input in llama.cpp
7. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

1. On a multi-GPU node use vllm serve ukisai/Swift1.5-Qwen3.8-Flash-Next --tensor-parallel-size 8 --max-model-len 262144 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, the parser the base's recipes and the card's SGLang command use
2. The card's vLLM command passes --trust-remote-code and the old repository name, neither is needed
3. On our reference machine only UkisAI's GSQ-RCO IQ3_S GGUF (84.7 GB with the projector) fits, below 4-bit
4. Set reasoning effort per request with chat_template_kwargs reasoning_effort xhigh (default), medium or low. UkisAI's own runs lose about 2.5 points at medium and low
5. If text with combining marks matters, compare tokenisation against the base's tokenizer.json before trusting outputs
6. Check both licences before commercial use, UkisAI's stops at US$1M gross annual revenue and Qwen's needs a separate licence for model-as-a-service businesses