Qwen2.5-Coder 32B Instruct vs Step-3.5-Flash

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct is a 32-billion-parameter code-specialized model from Alibaba, released in November 2024 and trained on a large corpus spanning 92 programming languages including C, Python, Java, Rust, and domain-specific languages. The model was designed to provide competitive code generation, repair, and reasoning capabilities as an open-weight alternative for developers building code assistant tools and automated review pipelines. Its 128K context window enables whole-file and multi-file code comprehension, making it particularly suited for complex repository-level tasks.

StepFun

Step-3.5-Flash, released by StepFun on February 2, 2026, is a Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 197 billion total parameters and approximately 11 billion active parameters per inference. It features a 256K token context window using a 3:1 sliding-window-to-full-attention ratio, processing 100–350 tokens per second. Step-3.5-Flash targets agentic tasks, coding workflows, and open-source deployments requiring frontier reasoning capabilities with efficient inference, under an Apache 2.0 license.