Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 vs Recursive Flint

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507

A quick general-purpose cousin, with 3.3B of 30.5B parameters active per token, for instruction following, tool calling and long documents without a thinking step. It needs about 21 to 23 GB at 4 bits, and several providers host it. The main risk is neglect, with no file changes in over a year, no answers from Alibaba and no safety results.

Recursive Flint

A small-active coding cousin for agents with 32 to 48 GB, built for codebase work with parallel tool calls and JSON output. It needs llama.cpp b11803 or Ollama 0.40.8 or later, and the BF16 checkpoint needs a 141 GB GPU. Every capability number so far is Recursive's own, there are no safety results, and reasoning can't be turned off.

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507

1. Quickest start is ollama run qwen3:30b-instruct, 19 GB. Plain qwen3:30b and qwen3:30b-a3b are the Thinking-2507 edition, not this one
2. On our reference machine use BF16 with vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 --max-model-len 262144 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser hermes, 61 GB of weights fits the GPU share
3. Use the hermes parser in vLLM or qwen25 in SGLang, the template emits JSON inside tool_call tags
4. Don't pass enable_thinking, this edition never thinks and the card says the flag isn't needed
5. Sampling per the card is temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8, top_k 20 and min_p 0, with presence_penalty up to 2 against repetition
6. Leave config.json as it is unless you need more than 262,144 tokens, the 1M mode swaps in config_1m.json and runs one sequence at a time
7. Validate JSON yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented

Recursive Flint

1. Quickest start is ollama run flint (Ollama 0.40.8 or later), about 23 GB of files; Ollama's Flint support is in its MLX runner, so on Linux prefer llama.cpp
2. With llama.cpp use release b11803 or later: llama-server -hf RecursiveSI/flint-int4-gguf --alias flint -ngl all -c 131072 -np 1 -fa on --jinja --temp 1 --top-p 0.95 --top-k 20 --min-p 0, and keep --jinja on
3. Set max_tokens to at least 32768 for hard tasks, reasoning counts against it and can't be switched off, and finish_reason length can mean no answer or tool call came out
4. Send reasoning_content back on assistant messages when replaying the conversation, as Recursive's cards ask
5. Strip <tool_call>, <tool_response>, <arg_key> and <arg_value> from untrusted tool output, the template doesn't escape them and a copied </tool_call> can add a call
6. Message content must be a string, flatten content-part arrays first
7. Recursive's SGLang servers listen on 0.0.0.0 with no key, publish the port on localhost only or pass --api-key