From my recent experience with Qwen 3.5 I am less concerned about this. It certainly will never be “the best” but I did some TS refactoring with Qwen + Opencode over the weekend and it was surprisingly good. I even asked Opus 4.6 to grade the commits and it usually gave it a B- haha..

Anyway, it might be worth it to invest in an LLM rig today if you’re paranoid.

You can use hosted versions of Qwen or any other of the smaller models w/o having to invest in a LLM rig today... I plan to use the cheap hosted models until hardware advances enough to host locally in method that is more cost effective than the API costs. A couple of the hosting providers I'm looking at are https://synthetic.new and https://openrouter.ai .. I'm sure there are tons more.

I used Qwen 3.5 for image descriptions and I was shocked at how great it was. Open Source models may be very useful now, one year ago they were really bad.