The thing here for me is not that I’m unable to solve problems with my brain, it’s that I value the automation in labor provided by coding agents. I do not want future advancements to be locked behind proprietary doors.

I agree with that but the cat is out of the bag now. Unless you believe in exponential improvement (which I don’t), the open models might be at a resource disadvantage, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t catch up or surpass the closed ones. Throwing money at a problem doesn’t guarantee success.

I mainly just want to point out the value of human ingenuity coupled with a model like DS4.1 is technically enough to get most people to where they want to go, and that includes smarter open models.