What open models are truly competing with both Claude Code and Opus 4.7 (xhigh) at this stage?
The open model mentality is also just so bizarre to me. You're going to use an inferior model to save, what, a couple hundred bucks a month? Is your time really worth that little?
No one working on a serious project at a serious company is downgrading their agent's intelligence for a marginal cost saving. Downgrading your model is like downgrading the toilet paper on your yacht.
I agree that people who claim that open models are as good as claude/openai/z are lying, delusional, or not doing very much. I've tried them all, included GLM 5.1.
GLM is not bad but the hardware needed will never recoup the ROI vs just using a commercial provider through its API.
That being said, you're being reductive here. For many use cases local models offer advantages that can't obtained through a commercial API : Privacy, ownership of the entire stack, predictability. They can't be rugpulled, they can't snitch on you. They will not give you 503.
Those advantages are very valuable for things like a local assistant, as an agent, for data extraction, for translations, for games (role playing and whatnot), etc.
That being said I know that many people are like you, they don't give a second thought about privacy. They'd plug Anthropic to their brain if they could. So I understand the sentiment. I just think that you should in turn try to understand why someone would use an open model.
5.1 is like $4 / 1m output, Opus 4.6 is $25. GPT 5.4 pro is $270 with large contexts :O
I've said it before and I'll say it again, local models are "there" in terms of true productive usage for complex coding tasks. Like, for real, there.
The issue right now is that buying the compute to run the top end local models is absurdly unaffordable. Both in general but also because you're outbidding LLM companies for limited hardware resources.
You have a $10K budget, you can legit run last year's SOTA agentic models locally and do hard things well. But most people don't or won't, nor does it make cost effective sense Vs. currently subsidized API costs.
So my point is: If you have the attitude that unless it is the bleeding edge, it may have well not exist, then local models are never going to be good enough. But truth is they're now well exceeding what they need to be to be huge productivity tools, and would have been bleeding edge fairly recently.
Don't you understand that by choosing the best model we can, we are, collectively, step by step devaluating what our time is worth? Do you really think we all can keep our fancy paychecks while keep using AI?
There were always jobs that required those "many more skills" but didn't require any programming skills.
We call those people Business Analysts and you could have been doing it for decades now. You didn't, because those jobs paid half what a decent/average programmer made.
Now you are willingly jumping into that position without realising that the lag between your value (i.e. half your salary, or less) would eventually disappear.
They don't need to all run on the same frameworks, they just need to run on documented frameworks.
What possible value can you bring to a BA?
The system topology (say, if the backend was microservices vs Lambda vs something-else)? The LLM can explain to the BA what their options are, and the impact of those options.
The framework being used (Vue, or React, or something else)? The AI can directly twiddle that for the BA.
Solving a problem? If the observability is setup, the LLM can pinpoint almost all the problems too,and with a separate UAT or failover-type replica, can repro, edit, build, deploy and test faster than you can.
Like I already said, if[1] you're now able to build or enhance a system without actually needing programming skills, why are you excited about that? You could always do that. It's just that it pays half what programming skills gets you.
You (and many others who boast about not writing code since $DATE) appear to be willingly moving to a role that already pays less, and will pay even less once the candidates for that role double (because now all you programmers are shifting towards it).
It's supply and demand, that's all.
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[1] That's a very big "If", I think. However, the programmers who are so glad to not program appear to believe that it's a very small "If", because they're the ones explaining just how far the capabilities have come in just a year, and expect the trend to continue. Of course, if the SOTA models never get better than what we have now, then, sure - your argument holds - you'll still provide value.
Early last year or late last year?
opus 4.5 was quite a leap