> that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling

they are not. Unless you are satisfied with plausible, but mostly garbage output.

They are actually quite a bit better than you might think. Qwen3.6 27B is pretty capable at coding.

For non-coding work, they are more than good enough. A lot of the ways my non-technical family members have interacted with AI would be perfectly served by using a local model.

After all, people were more than satisfied with the results from GPT 3. That has long since been surpassed by open weight models.

isn't that literally all output an LLM generates?

I get results comparable to the saas. Maybe Anthropic sold you too much crack tokens.

Honestly, that's the output I get from non-local models, anyway. If I'm going to get plausible nonsense either way, I may as well run it on my own hardware.