I ran the qwen 3.5 35b a3b q4 model locally on a ryzen server with 64k context window and 5-8 tokens a second.

It is the first local model I've tried which could reason properly. Similar to Gemini 2.5 or sonnet 3.5. I gave it some tools to call , asked claude to order it around, (download quotes, print charts, set up a gnome extension) even claude was sort of impressed that it could get the job done.

Point is, it is really close. It isn't opus 4.5 yet, but very promising given the size. Local is definitely getting there and even without GPUs.

But you're right, I see no reason to spend right now.

Getting Opus to call something local sounds interesting, since that's more or less what it's doing with Sonnet anyway if you're using Claude Code. How are you getting it to call out to local models? Skills? Or paying the API costs and using Pi?