Getting better, but definitely not there yet, nor near Sonnet 4.5 performance.

What these open models are great for are for narrow, constrained domains, with good input/output examples. I typically use them for things like prompt expansion, sentiment analysis, reformatting or re-arranging flow of code.

What I found they have trouble with is going from ambiguous description -> solved problem. Qwen 3.5 is certainly the best of the OSS models I've found (beating out GPT 120b OSS which was the previous king), and it's just starting to demonstrate true intelligence in unbound situations, but it isn't quite there yet. I have a RTX 6000 pro, so Qwen 3.5 is free for me to run, but I tend to default to Composer 1.5 if I want to be cheap.

The trend however is super encouraging. I bought my vid card with the full expectation that we'll have a locally running GPT 5.2 equiv by EoY, and I think we're on track.