The big caveat here is that these local models require you to invest some time tweaking your harness, AGENTS.md, and skills in order to get things roughly to the level you'd expect. But something like Qwen3.6-27B with web search capabilities and a good set of skills really is impressive! Especially considering that you can go wild and not worry about token costs.

The other thing that people tend to gloss over is that you really do need to spend some $$$ on decent hardware. Yeah, you CAN run some 4-bit quant with heavily quantized cache on your 16GB card, but it's not going to be a great experience (I think this is where a lot of the "if you think it's gonna be any good, you're going to be disappointed" stuff comes from). Yes it's a lot of $$$ upfront but it's very much unknown when hardware prices are going to come back to reality. There's a lot of hopes and dreams that any minute now an H100 will be worth pennies because "that's how it's always been" w.r.t. computer hardware, but we are living in interesting times. So you can't just make the tired old assumptions that a Claude subscription over three years time will work out to be dramatically less than the value of some card three years from now. We STILL have basically anything with >=24GB VRAM appreciating in value, which is absolutely wild. What I'm saying is, the depreciation curve may very well be a lot less dramatic and fast than it used to be, going forward.