I don't believe this one bit. There is no way local models are good enough except for the most basic of coding.

[delayed]

You haven't spent much time with the latest self hosted models then. Give it a good harness and instructions, access to a web search engine and ability to iterate on problems and they do a good enough job that I'm happy with the results.

I hate to break it to you but most people do most people do basic things most of the time

Don’t know what to tell you. It’s happening.

But there's just no way.

What do you consider a local model? I'm running DeepSeek Flash version 4.1 and it's outstanding.

Local models: if they have the hardware to run it.

Open models: we're already seeing this at some scale. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50350004. I do expect to see more of this.

Why is it unbelievable? I still remember how to program and arch new features and don't need claude to tell me how to do it. It is much more enjoyable to do a little work on your project and offload the grunt work to a weaker model then just being a highly paid merge pr button pusher for whatever opus decides.

This is what I've been doing with qwen3.8-flash-next. I haven't fully let go of the reins yet but I do like having a junior who can implement my new features as I have designed them

I recommend you to try DS 4.1 flash, I definitely do not do "basic coding" with it. Also it's so cheap you don't even actually need to run it locally, according to my usage dashboard on opencode go it's about $1 for 1.5 billion tokens.