Which models when run locally come close to Sol and Opus, from your experience? And which harness do you use?

Qwen 3.8 27B is so far the closest I have run, though it suffers on speed compared to Gemma4 26B MoE model which I still use. Neither are going to match Opus or Sol though, but they can be as fast or faster depending on what you are using them for.

I don't use a harness, all the mainstream ones I have tried have tanked my productivity. I know that's not a common sentiment, but it's been my experience. None seem built for the way I work. I program mostly in my head first away from keyboard, then go type it out (faster than it would take to describe the solution to an LLM). Also a perfectionist who likes to learn, and tends to work on out of distribution problems. All I need is a simple chat interface for light research, quick small scoped prototypes, and generating simple scripts.

Not saying a harness is out of the question for me, just all I have seen and tested so far are not for me. Maybe if someone builds a more deterministic harness that doesn't rely on plain English skill files that bloat context and only sometimes do what you want.