> No they weren't. They were a gimmick - it is only in the past 6 or so months that frontier models have started to do stuff beyond mere gimmicks when it comes to coding

This is simply untrue. Using agentic orchestration I was writing production code daily 3 years ago. Hallucinations happened sometimes and context window was smaller (so you had to do some funky workarounds to deal with larger codebases), but it was workable. There have been a lot of marked improvements from a code perspective then - a lot model related yes, but also a lot in the ease of use, interfaces, etc.

> Another thing I'd say is that you clearly have no clue what 'consumer hardware' means, or what consumers that can even get this stuff running locally would have to do to get it to even rival the frontier models in terms of their usability (most consumers are't going to just boot into Ubuntu and run this thing from a command line) flow, to say nothing of the hardware requirements.

You've moved the goalposts. My point was that the "danger" of no new open models being released isn't that high as the existing ones are already impressive. Their ease of use or daily driving isn't relevant to that. If there were a need, someone could wrap a clean interface and support around it, or run it as their own cloud solution.

You seem to be arguing something adjacent to my point, which is fine I guess but I have little to say. Also multiple of your comments have come across quite aggressive and rude. Just food for thought if you want to work on that or not.