[dangus]

While I agree with you on open models getting better, I have been starting to see how the value, the reason you pay for Claude, isn’t in the models.

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.

[dwedge]

Aside from filling in the timesheet (which I assume could be done from a CSV import - I appreciate this is another step), I have almost the same setup as you, without AI. I have bugwarrior pulling JIRA tickets and github PRs into taskwarrior. I have an integration from task warrior into time warrior and from there another hook back into JIRA to get titles and summarise.

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.

[dangus]

In my case, I don’t have access to the APIs nor does my company’s ancient trash timesheet app have any ability to bulk upload.

That’s what’s so great about these programs, really, is that you can just do the thing out of plain language.

[daxfohl]

So far there's no moat though. A lot of that kind of stuff is available open source too if you look for it (and was available before claude desktop). And for anything that doesn't exist, with coding agents now you can write one up in an afternoon.

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.

[dangus]

If there’s an open source alternative to Claude desktop that has a similar amount of extensibility with connectors specifically I’d be very interested to know about it. I’m very much not deep into this space.

[c0rruptbytes]

https://github.com/OpenCoworkAI/open-cowork

https://www.eigent.ai/

[checker]

https://opencode.ai/

[abalashov]

I get local models to drive applications through MCP (e.g. Google Chrome DevTools) via OpenCode all the time, and do things that would otherwise be very token-intensive and result in pointless meatspin. This is totally possible, and will become more so.

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.

[fragmede]

Unfortunately for Claude, you can have it set up local models to do that for you and then you don't need to renew it. Codex's computer use is better than Claude's, imo. I'm a Mac, no idea about windows but I know there's no Linux version. Haven't had enough time with Opus 4.8 but GPT 5.5 > Opus 4.6 and 4.7.

[dwedge]

I have mixed feelings here. I find codex much better than Claude for generating PoCs and debugging small scripts, and for finding online documentation. I find Claude a bit better for debugging distributed systems and summarising data

[ako]

OpenAI may be better positioned than you think with Codex being able to drive your applications without an API according to Nate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d9ZmA-4QzU&t=1093s

[c0rruptbytes]

this is also possible with local models, MCP is an open standard

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