Qwen2.5-Coder 7B Instruct vs Step-3.5-Flash

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct is a 7-billion-parameter code-specialized model from Alibaba, released in November 2024 as part of the Qwen2.5-Coder family, trained on a curated corpus spanning 92 programming languages with emphasis on code generation, debugging, and fill-in-the-middle completion. Built on the Qwen2.5 architecture, it extends the base series' improvements in instruction-following and long-context handling to coding-specific tasks within a compact deployable footprint. It became popular for integration into IDE extensions, CI pipelines, and self-hosted code assistant tools.

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.