Vibe coding requires the sota models to work at all, but someone who knows what they are doing and uses the AI more responsibly can absolutely use the cheaper Chinese models for coding, and they’re often faster too. If I was one of the big players my entire focus would be on lobbying for regulation and outright banning of local models.

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storus 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, Qwen3 coder for Claude Code and 3.5 for OpenClaw replaced my full-stack use of Opus 4.6 already; it's fine for basic web apps, k8s/docker infra setup, optimizing AI models etc. with only slightly higher error rate than Opus. Upcoming 3.6 together with Gemma4 might make it even better (still to test). OpenAI's memory spot market play might have been directed at local inference as well.

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nothinkjustai 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Look for Deepseek 4 when it drops, I’m curious how good it will be.

The thing is, if you’re using AI responsibly today you’re already breaking down tasks to such a granular level that you don’t need the power of Opus. You can save that for deeper research tasks.

	▲	storus 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Based on the current DeepSeek website I suspect it's not going to be great as their current model (V3.4? V4-mini?) often forgets or changes facts explicitly mentioned in the conversation which R1 never did. It's better than R1 at math or coding, but nearly unusable for deep conversation. I suspect they pushed MLA or linear attention too much, or quantize a lot more than before.