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Comment by user43928 | Hacker News Reader

> The performance of local AI for coding, given correct setup & harness, is very good and on par for 95% of use cases compared to closed models

While I don't know your specific use cases, when interpreted generally, this seems trivially disproven by putting eg. websites made by Opus 5.5 and the local model side by side.

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I have merely a laptop 5090 (24 GB) and I can run Qwen3.8 Flash IQ3_XXS at 110-140 tok/s on Strata, 128K context. If Artificial Analysis' benchmarks mean anything, it sits somewhere around GPT 5.6 Terra/Sol. I use both that and Codex/Sol 6.1 most days of the week, for different projects. I don't feel like I'm particularly compromised when working locally - I very rarely think "ah man I wish I could just point Codex at this". The biggest problem is speed - it needs more reasoning time and I can only work single-threaded.

Have you tried basalt? I understand that it allows multiple concurrent requests

Those benchmarks are easily gamed in my opinion. I take them woth a huge grain of salt.

I am currently building an integrated CAD + Aero + CAM software package for rapid UAV design iteration, and the open models are all not very good at it. They make a ton of mistakes and I have to end up redoing a lot. And that's using very detailed specs and TDDs provided as context to the models. Opus/Astra/Argon/Gemini Flash 3.8/Sol does a significantly better job in my experience.

Imagine thinking that the look of a website is the right metric to judge the performance of AI models.

It is one metric to judge them. And if you do frontend stuff, it's probably a fairly relevant one.

If your job is to produce websites that look good it's an excellent way to judge performance of AI models _for your workflow_.

What's the problem?

The problem is you can change the prompt a little and get correct results on a local AI too.

Frontend has been solved for years.

I don't think changing the prompt alone is going to do it, but iteratively providing feedback can get you there.

With GPT-5.4 or GPT-5.5, or of course also by writing the code by hand if we want to go all the way, it was well possible to build nice frontends to our liking.

I still don't want to go back when I can do it better and faster with Opus 5.5.

Most of the look of the thing is about the built in tools and skills and harness settings, not the quality of the code. those things can be replicated locally as well.

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