For example, I just hooked Claude desktop up to my outlook to build a report for my timesheet then I used the chrome extension to fill it out automatically with that data. It could read Jira tickets if that’s where the information was.
A local model can’t do that for me because I have to get the rest of the integration software somewhere.
I also think this is why OpenAI is the worst positioned of the group of AI giants. Anthropic is trying to make a productivity operating system, while ChatGPT is basically just a website until recently.
All of that is done with two API keys and no AI. A local agent could easily put it together for you.
Now sure, I had to put this together and I lose the AI summary you have plus the auto filling, but what I'm trying to say is that I have 80% of this without any AI.
I also have a script parsing git from my emails and a little tui that translates them into git diff and a key binding to pull the PR but I find it a little cumbersome and don't really use it, and trying to parse todo from maildir is also a little useless so I accept that AI would be better there.
I also accept that your example is just one prompt of a dozen and I have to plan the solution for every one of your prompts, but I also don't find prompting to be terribly useful for occasions where I don't think the solution through- because it probably means I don't know what I want or don't really need it.
What I do find it really useful for is digging through Kubernetes and asking how two services are connected. Claude is better than local for that but there's nothing inherently non-local about that usage.
That’s what’s so great about these programs, really, is that you can just do the thing out of plain language.
It's kind of paradoxical in a way. By making writing software cheap, they've made it much harder to create a moat for themselves that involves only software. It'll be interesting to see how they respond.
The real reason you pay for Claude _is_ in the models. The locally runnable models are impressive for what they are, but simply will not accomplish the task as effectively, incisively or quickly enough. I have to be willing to let OpenCode run in agentic loop on "download my bank statements"[1] for an hour and just walk away, and take a low-ish but profoundly nonzero chance that it will just fail. Claude can do it in 5 minutes, if I let it (I have), and it will not fail. Both are driving the browser via MCP and performing the same task.
[1] One of those difficult-to-use, modal-rich JavaScript-laden banking portals that seems quite intentionally designed to prevent this sort of downloading, or I wouldn't bother letting an agent loose on it in the first place.
if you already have claude, you can even get it to set it all up for you too
the issue with local models is just the compute required, it's hard to compete with 100t/s cloud models