# Qwen3-30B-A3B

41 Hacker News commenters recommended Qwen3-30B-A3B and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 10 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Fast mixture-of-experts model that runs on modest hardware and handles everyday text and quick coding well; critics say it is verbose and weak on fiction and harder code.

## Why people recommend it

- Fast token generation on modest hardware (6 comments): "It's very very fast and pretty good, and speed matters when you're replacing basic google searches and text manipulation." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46002821)) "Qwen models are in general amazing, but 30B is v fast cuz it's an MoE" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46005940)) "I get a highly usable 50 tokens per second out of the A3B instruct" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843700))
- Good enough for everyday tasks (4 comments): "I find the output of Qwen3's 30B model for that sort of task is plenty good enough." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46359773)) "it still offers me value for my use cases (many small prototypes and tests)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195744)) "Qwen3-30B which is good enough for some quick javascript or Python" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46897429))
- Runs on affordable consumer GPUs (4 comments): "Qwen3 8B or A30B are quite capable models which run on a lot of hardware even today" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362294)) "even if the model doesn't completely fit on the GPU it's still fast enough" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47192943)) "That model only needs a £500 second hand GPU - that's impressive for me." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46155361))
- Useful for coding with prepared prompts (3 comments): "the most efficient way is to use larger models for coordination, but a heretic'ed qwen 30B model for the implementations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48990674)) "very useful for coding if I prepare a one-shot prompt with directions and relevant code" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364938)) "Qwen3-30B which is good enough for some quick javascript or Python" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46897429))

## What people warn about

- Weak for coding and fiction (2 comments): "didn't find it to be great for my coding use case" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46537097)) "absolutely terrible at editing fiction" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47102925))

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- [Fable](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fable.md): 823 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Qwen3-30B-A3B", https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen3-30b-a3b/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).