LLM weights aren’t code; the engines that run them are completely separate, so they don’t have traditional “backdoors.”

It’s possible some elaborate prompt trigger was trained into the weights, but there’s never been any evidence of that, for years. I’d say worrying about that is paranoid unless you work at the DoD or something, and some full-weights finetuning would scramble it anyway.

An infinite number of. With models, the concept of backdoors becomes a bit fuzzy.

I've been rocking Qwen 3.8 27b for programming, anyone have an opinion if Coder Next is a better alternative?

I mean both, for different purposes. They are definitely very different.