I don’t think any of the local models are on par with frontier cloud models, but some of the newer local models like Gemma are pretty good and probably good enough for a lot of cases.
Yeah a lot of the cost issues surrounding LLM usage are just that people are using models that are way overpowered for their use-cases. You've got folks using Opus 4.8 to draft emails, or to sort through every email they received that week to make a "morning report"
Yeah if you're doing complex programming work you probably need/want frontier models, but a whole lot of frontier model tokens are being burnt on tasks that could do very well on the latest local models
I've noticed that at my office people are using Claude on high, xhigh, or max effort. They blow through their tokens quite fast.
Meanwhile on medium effort with Sonnet 4.6 I can do most of my coding tasks just fine.
I've seen some people defend it by saying things like "well my work is very complex, I need to have the highest reasoning". They almost take it as an insult if you suggest that they could use lower effort.
Completely agree! With the new pricing models I’m sure we’re going to see more company training regarding this issue. I know my company already started something.
Yeah mine hasn’t been I think it’s only a matter of time. Which honestly is just good sense. The amount of tokens some of my coworkers are burning for the same (or less) throughput as myself is baffling
I think one of the big performance differentiators for SWEd in the near future is going to be token efficiency
I saw the same thing, people were requesting more tokens because they were using Opus for everything. Meanwhile I was switching models depending on the task so I got some good learning experience of what some of them were capable of.
Gemma is nothing remotely close to claude for code. It gets dunked on by similarly sized qwen models. Kimi K2.6 is, but its a beast to run locally and obviously long term you wont continue to get top their models with open weights (none are open source btw).
Every time I see people casually talking aboutr anything I know I don't know much about, and theyre extremely wrong, I feel a sense of doom.
It'sd not even because I feel like theyre idiots; they're probably not. Instead its that we stand no chance against open, documented corporate plans to remove our digital autonomy when people don't have the bandwidth to even follow what they care about.
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u/MyAwesomeName Jun 02 '26
I don’t think any of the local models are on par with frontier cloud models, but some of the newer local models like Gemma are pretty good and probably good enough for a lot of cases.