I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models.

I know LLMs move at the speed of light (especially these past few quarters), but if Opus and GPT "a few months ago" were really like open weight models, then there's really no reason to not switch, especially for those who were using these models a few months ago.

Your codebase didn't change, so use the open weight model. Don't move the goalposts.

Every new proprietary model is "groundbreaking" and "look, it just solved task X that no other model could solve," only to be referred to as "that crappy previous-generation model" a month later.

So yeah, I'm totally fine using Kimi-2.7, GLM-5.2 or Deepseek-v4. I think we've already hit the ceiling and most improvements now seem to be from harness improvements and slightly better RL to improve reasoning/tool calling.

> I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models

I experiment a lot with the open models and I’m getting tired of this trope. I’m not yet convinced that even the best open weight models are equal to Opus from “a few months” ago.

I know what the benchmarks say. I had higher hopes. My real experience just doesn’t match the benchmarks.

I also do a lot of work that even Opus 4.8 struggles with. When even the cutting edge LLMs aren’t all the way there yet, my motivation to switch to something even further behind just isn’t there.

The only reason I'm on HN right now reading this post is because the Anthropic's API is down... so there's another point for self hosted.

Intelligence is maybe a few months behind. But cost sadly is further behind. GLM-5.2 has a deceptively high cost during day-to-day usage for e.g. coding because 1) it has to think a ton more than GPT-5.5/Opus-4.8 to get to competitive results; 2) many providers are still figuring out caching; and 3) API pricing for Codex/Claude can be as high as 40x more than subscription pricing, which distorts the market.

We have a provider with Deepseek V4 flash at our work. It can handle 95% of the "actually functional" workload at a tenth of the cost. I still pull up beefier ones sometimes, but that's after some consideration.

The moat is so flat, it only gives +1 food and +1 production. +1 gold with a road.

For that matter, the new models are shit. If I’m using Opus 4.6 anyway to get anything actually done, then great, we’re actually entirely caught up then.

The reason for me is work pays for Github Copilot which doesn't have these open modals.

> I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models.

The really interesting thing is that it's typically those very same accounts who were explaining, a few months ago, that thanks to their commercial model they were gaining so much time and producing so much fantastic code.

A few months passes and suddenly the open-source model have caught up with the models that were gaining them so much time and that produced amazing code (in production everywhere for sure btw) but... It's impossible to work with these models.

Rinse and repeat.

The current models, according to them, are basically AGI and they can go fishing while paid subscriptions solve the world's problems.

But when it six months there shall be new closed, pricey, models and when the open ones shall have reach the level of Fable, we'll hear how it's impossible to work in late 2026 on a model that is "only at the level of Fable".

These people should have been snake-oil salesmen (and it could be what they actually are).

Even just one of the smaller models is good enough for the grunt work I use them for 90% of the time. Currently doing most of my home hobby projects with OpenCode Go and Qwen 3.7 Plus, it's not great at diagnosing issues in the code, but if I can clearly articulate a test suite or boilerplate refactoring it works fine.

ok but your competition using the latest models has an advantage

not all of us are doing noob shit lol