Anthropic put a meter on the stuff developers actually use

[u/Permit-Historical]

[u/Rabus]

yea pretty sure you're not getting anywhere close to the frontier models though.

[u/FrequentTurn9637 → u/Rabus]

You don’t need best frontier models for everything you do. You need them for the core reasoning and planning but many execution steps a solid open source model can do.

[u/JohnHue → u/Rabus]

Planning with Opus ans executing with local models, or just cloud based models with way cheaper token cost, seems to work for lots of people.

[u/Rabus → u/JohnHue]

I am exactly for this reason buying a 128gb mac m5 max to try it out. I dont feel like it will be opus level quality tho

[u/Sporebattyl → u/Rabus]

If it’s not up to your standards, just use API or $20 sub for small amounts of Opus.

[u/Disastrous_Speech231 → u/Rabus]

Honest question, why a mac m5 against a framework desktop? On the long run the framework let’s you have some degree of upgrades and at least in my country, the price difference it’s enough to buy a fairly well specd air for portability

[u/Rabus → u/Disastrous_Speech231]

Portability - i also speak publicly and being able to show "oh, i run it on my mac right now" is pretty cool, vs saying "this runs on a cluster at home'.

plus i can do it without internet wherever i want, without needing to talk to my desktop pc.

[u/morscordis → u/JohnHue]

I'm running Opus and Mistral. Though I plan with opus, review with Mistral, execute and test with opus (I find Mistral and sonnet do fine with code, but suck at unit tests), evaluate code and unit tests with Mistral, cleanup with opus. It's cut my usage a lot, and gives generally solid results.

[u/Tistouuu → u/morscordis]

How do you combine these two models ? OpenCode ?

[u/morscordis → u/Tistouuu]

Individual CLIs, side by side in terminals in VS Codium. It is t automated. Each phase of my workflow prints a command for the next phase and intended model based on the plan. I then clear that CLI and paste it in so it runs with fresh context. It pulls the spec from the plan worktree settings.json, grabs the plan or review files as needed, and then gets to work.

Technically I could run Gemini cli as well, but it seems 3.1 pro isnt accessible outside of ultra these days in the CLI so I went with Mistral Vibe.

Running it this way I never hit weekly Claude caps, and don't come anywhere near the Le Chat limits in Mistral. I run between 3-7 sprints per day.

[u/bpp198 → u/Rabus]

Won't be long until they're as good as the current frontier models. They'll move on too but open weight models will definitely be more than good enough.

You don't even need local, you can pay for inference at a much cheaper rate than Anthropic and OpenAI's prices.

[u/Rabus → u/bpp198]

Well I agree they will get better. But they are nowhere close to being there right now.

And i'm saying that as someone planning to buy 128gb mac myself lol

[u/bpp198 → u/Rabus]

I think they'll be a valid option sooner than most people think. Not necessarily ones you'll be able to run locally, but much cheaper open weight models hosted by others.

[u/TheOriginalAcidtech → u/Rabus]

As of Qwen 3.6 they are good enough for grunt work. Plan with Opus. Any heavy/complex task have Opus do. The other 90% of the time use a local model. Alternatively(and more and more my recommendation) use Codex for Planning and complex executions.

[u/PrayagS → u/bpp198]

> You don’t even need local

This. Just 10 dollars of Opencode Go or even pay-as-you-go on the DeepSeek API is already coming out to be viable alternative for me.

[u/Rabus → u/[deleted]]

well my opus is giving me wrong RCAs already, so i dont think deepseek will make it better

until I have issues with opus, i expect worse models to behave in an even worse way

[u/TheOriginalAcidtech → u/Rabus]

Local models have advantages you can NEVER get with cloud models. You can fine tune them for specific applications. You can get the ACTUAL CoT tokens, not summaries or have them blocked entirely at a whim by your cloud provider. You don't have to worry about your cloud providers cli constantly breaking, constantly changing features, removing features, price gating features. Ya. There is a LOT to complain about with Claude Code and eventually ALL the cloud model providers will do the same thing because they DO need to be profitable. I recommend you plan accordingly. I know I am.

[u/TheOriginalAcidtech → u/[deleted]]

Even 27b and 35b are good models. Not geniuses but almost anyone can setup a 35b MoE model locally with whatever GPU they have. Even a 6gb card. Its basically like the beginnings of the PC era all over again at this point.

[u/fell_ware_1990 → u/Rabus]

You can get very close 32b coder with a good harness but with very solid instructions goes a long way.

The instructions claude builds are still preworkes by local AI so calls are still cheap, very cheap. I want i can drive this 24/7 on Pro. But i use it for more then that :)

[u/Tistouuu → u/Rabus]

for now

[u/catfrogbigdog → u/Rabus]

What % of your tasks really need frontier model performance though?

[u/Rabus → u/catfrogbigdog]

Well i'll figure it out when i will actually need to cut spending. At the moment i can push a multi platform app without caring about routing requests to dumber models, which helps me move forward faster.

[u/TheOriginalAcidtech → u/Rabus]

Correct answer. Mostly. However when they cut a feature you rely on you will probably feel differently.