My experience thus far is that the local models are a) pretty slow and b) prone to making broken tool calls. Because of (a) the iteration loop slows down enough to where I wander off to do other tasks, meaning that (b) is way more problematic because I don't see it for who knows how long.

This is, however, a major improvement from ~6 months ago when even a single token `hi` from an agentic CLI could take >3 minutes to generate a response. I suspect the parallel processing of LMStudio 0.4.x and some better tuning of the initial context payload is responsible.

6 months from now, who knows?

Open models are trained more generically to work with "Any" tool.

Closed models are specifically tuned with tools, that model provider wants them to work with (for example specific tools under claude code), and hence they perform better.

I think this will always be the case, unless someone tunes open models to work with the tools that their coding agent will use.