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What do you need a frontier model for, really.

Frontier models like Fable are mostly useful if you want to paste in one or two prompts, and receive a subtly broken application that looks impressive. That is very hard to do with local models today.

What current local models work fine for is delegating clearly-described tasks in a code base the programmer actually understands. Qwen3.6 27B and DeepSeek V4 Flash are both great little workhorses.

There's also GLM 5.2, which is kind of like "store brand Opus", and which might be considered a "near-frontier" model. I don't have as much experience with it.

FWIW Fable is insanely expensive for the task you just described, so much so that I don't think it's practical for that. Its practical use is as a dev lead / architect / project manager model, doing planning and writing detailed feature specs and code reviews while Opus/Codex/Gemini does the actual coding.

research, refactoring, architecture

also just code-that-is-not-as-shit in general

for clearly defined stuff smaller models are fine, but at that point I'd rather write the code myself

in any case, if there's a chance a cheaper model will fuck it up, is the price diff worth gambling with your time?

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