GILD verdict
Adopt Qwen Code when your engineers run Qwen or other open models, locally or on Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, and want an open-source terminal agent built for them.
It fits teams that will choose a paid route or local model per engineer, keep Coding Plan keys out of automation, and build their own audit trail from its telemetry.
Qwen Code
AI Coding Agent by Alibaba
−50 Strong negativeFit and limits
Who it fits
- Engineers run Qwen, GLM, Kimi, or other open models on their own hardware through Ollama, vLLM, LM Studio, or llama.cpp.
- The team bills models through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, on Coding Plan, Token Plan, or pay-as-you-go keys.
- You want an Apache 2.0 agent you can inspect, fork, or strip of telemetry, with VS Code, Zed, and JetBrains plugins and MCP.
- You want one agent that can call OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and Qwen APIs and switch models with /model.
Where it falls short
- The free Qwen OAuth tier ended on April 15, 2026, so the free route that early accounts praise is gone, and a practitioner reports its daily quota first fell from 1,000 to 100 requests.
- Practitioners report tasks that stop silently, failed file writes with local models, 401 errors on paid keys, and OAuth that cannot complete on remote servers.
- Context use runs high: subagents that start at about 105,000 tokens, a pending tool result counted twice after compaction, and a VS Code add-on that invalidates about 100,000 tokens of cache on small follow-ups.
- Qwen Code documents no SSO, SCIM, or audit log, sends usage statistics by default for every auth method, and Coding Plan keys may not run scripts, pipelines, or backends.
Implementation reality
Choose a route per engineer
Coding Plan Pro costs US$50 a month per account for interactive use, with up to 6,000 requests per 5 hours. Use pay-as-you-go Model Studio or third-party keys for anything automated, and local models through Ollama or vLLM where prompts must stay on your hardware.
Turn off usage statistics
Usage statistics are on by default for every auth method, including your own API key, and go to an Alibaba Cloud collection endpoint. Turn them off in settings before rollout, and set the provider's own retention terms for prompts and responses.
Export telemetry as the audit trail
Qwen Code documents no admin audit log, so send its OpenTelemetry events, such as qwen-code.user_prompt and qwen-code.tool_call, to a backend you control and keep them as the record of what the agent ran.
Test MCP, proxy, and IDE setups first
Connect every MCP server you need before rollout, and test the IDE plugin and proxy settings on your network. One company's in-house Qwen3 service failed because Qwen Code ignored no_proxy in October 2025.
What to verify before you buy
- On Model Studio, Alibaba says it never trains on your data and stores data generated from model calls.
- Alibaba states that Model Studio has achieved SOC 2 compliance with an unqualified opinion for Security, Availability, and Confidentiality.
- Alibaba Cloud's ActionTrail, which records operation data for an account, lists audit events for Model Studio among the services it covers.
- Qwen Code's qwen serve guide calls multi-tenancy, OIDC, quota and audit orchestration out of scope for the project.
- Qwen Code has no fixed model: model.name sets the default model to activate when Qwen Code starts, and the /model picker switches between the models you declare.
- When you use your own API key, the terms and privacy policies of your chosen API provider apply, not Qwen Code's terms, and Qwen Code points you to that provider's documentation for data usage, retention and privacy practices.
- Qwen Code's qwen serve guide says to spawn one daemon per principal when each needs its own token, quota or audit log.
- Alibaba Cloud's Model Studio page states no unauthorized training on customer data, with data processing governed by service terms or a DPA.
What to measure in your pilot
- Count Coding Plan requests per engineer for a month; if anyone hits the 5-hour cap weekly, price a Token Plan or pay-as-you-go key for them.
- Track tasks that stop silently or fail on file writes per model for the first quarter, and switch the model or harness for the worst offenders.
- Check each release's privacy notice for changes to usage statistics before upgrading.
Sources
- Official documentation
- 12
- Public source
- 5
- QwenLM/qwen-code on GitHub (README)
- QwenLM/qwen-code LICENSE (Apache License 2.0)
- Qwen Code docs: Authentication
- Qwen Code docs: Terms of service and privacy notice
- Qwen Code docs: Telemetry
- Alibaba Cloud Model Studio: Coding Plan overview
- Alibaba Cloud Model Studio: Qwen Code
- Alibaba Cloud Model Studio: Privacy notice
- Alibaba Cloud ActionTrail: Cloud services supported by ActionTrail
- Qwen Code docs: qwen serve
- Alibaba Cloud Trust Center: Compliance
- r/LocalLLaMA: Qwen-Code CLI free tier ended Apr 15 (Apr 16, 2026)
- QwenLM/qwen-code issue #756: no_proxy ignored for a company's in-house Qwen3 service (Oct 2, 2025)
- QwenLM/qwen-code issue #15660: subagents start with a 105,000-token prompt (Oct 26, 2026)
- r/LocalLLaMA: a coding harness that will not invalidate the context cache at each prompt (Sep 16, 2026)
- r/LocalLLaMA: setting up remote server code generation for a team (Mar 5, 2026)
- Alibaba Cloud: Model Studio product page