The reason for the insane popularity is because it's pretty good AND free. It's a no-brainer to switch to this for anything usage-based that isn't frontier coding while the free limits are available. It's probably running a model ~100B parameters under the hood, which won't be so heavily subsidized for long.
EDIT: our tool usage benchmark is still running, but so far, its performance with tools is dramatically better than its one shot performance. I'm treating Qwen 3.6 Plus as a near-SOTA model now.
so it's not so clear cut
git clone https://github.com/nixos/nixpkgs
ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://openrouter.ai/api ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=<make_an_account_on_openrouter_and_get_this_from_the_settings_panel> claude --model qwen/qwen3.6-plus:free
> This repository has two ways of packaging Nix packages: defining them via pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix (the old way); or defining them via the pkgs/by-name directory (the new way). Let's port my_example_package over to the new way.
i'm not actually working in the nixpkgs repo -- i'm trying these in a private repo that has very similar structure. i'm also a n00b with these tools, so probably a bad prompt. but Qwen 3.6 actually conflates "the old way" with "the new way", attempts to do the porting in reverse, and just gets stuck. gemma-4 E4B does better. even gpt-oss-120b, an open weight model from a _year_ ago, does the full port unattended.
so either it's shit at coding, or i'm using it wrong. curious to hear other anecdotes.