Last year I didn't use any of the model (other than for chat and some snippets here and there), exactly because I didn't think them good enough. It should be said that I think DS is vastly better than that, but I think the closed source frontier models are just so good by now, that stepping down to "N-X" months just feels all the more painful.
Opus 4.6 was descent last year already
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 on February 5, 2026. What year are you in, man?
thank you for nitpicking.
Whatever was in Dec 2025 was very good already.
For agentic coding, Qwen 3.8-27B is not far from that, and Qwen 3.8 Next is there. Never used DeepSeek 4.1 flash but I'd be surprised if it wasn't better than this.