If you actually know the code and can give guidance, direction, and corrections they absolutely are.

If you are just vibing and managing multiple agents and reviewing at a higher level like architecture, you are right.

Don’t know what to tell you. It’s happening.

Why is it unbelievable? I still remember how to program and arch new features and don't need claude to tell me how to do it. It is much more enjoyable to do a little work on your project and offload the grunt work to a weaker model then just being a highly paid merge pr button pusher for whatever opus decides.

What do you consider a local model? I'm running DeepSeek Flash version 4.1 and it's outstanding.

Local models: if they have the hardware to run it.

Open models: we're already seeing this at some scale. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50350004. I do expect to see more of this.

You haven't spent much time with the latest self hosted models then. Give it a good harness and instructions, access to a web search engine and ability to iterate on problems and they do a good enough job that I'm happy with the results.

I hate to break it to you but most people do most people do basic things most of the time