It feels very close to a trade-off point.

I agree with all posts in the chain: Opus is good, Anthropic have burned good will, I would like to use other models...but Opus is too good.

What I find most frustrating is that I am not sure if it is even actual model quality that is the blocker with other models. Gemini just goes off the rails sometimes with strange bugs like writing random text continuously and burning output tokens, Grok seems to have system prompts that result in odd behaviour...no bugs just doing weird things, Gemini Flash models seem to output massive quantities of text for no reason...it is often feels like very stupid things.

Also, there are huge issues with adopting some of these open models in terms of IP. Third parties are running these models and you are just sending them all your code...with a code of conduct promise from OpenRouter?

I also don't think there needs to be a huge improvement in models. Opus feels somewhat close to the reasonable limit: useful, still outputs nonsense, misses things sometimes...there are open models that can reach the same 95th percentile but the median is just the model outputting complete nonsense and trying to wipe your file system.

The day for open models will come but it still feels so close and so far.