[westoque]

> Comparing agentic Qwen3.6 35b to Claude Opus is like a junior with knowledge across the board, that you really need to guide, versus a senior that thinks with you on architecture.

that's why i use the frontier models because its a senior co-worker vs a junior. if you use the junior for the sake of privacy i think you're missing out on the best insights for a specific task.

[physix]

The dilemma I am facing is cost.

Consumer-grade subscriptions of the frontier models give you superb capabilities per dollar, them being heavily subsidized. But if you're working in an enterprise setting, that won't work. You need to upgrade, and that gets significantly more expensive.

Furthermore, basing the SDLC on leveraging the bargain subscriptions risks falling apart in the future, both from a cost perspective as well as the question of availability (e.g. Mythos).

So from a strategic perspective, going local on the LLM and still achieving great results with the right approach is very relevant.

[willisrocks]

Or you can get the best of both worlds--use frontier models to build a spec/plan, and use cheap models (open source or not) for implementation. Your max or team plan can go a lot further this way without giving up much for quality. Play with something like Superpowers to make this really approachable.

[bxk76]

Best insights can be over rated due to bandwith limitation of the brain. Even if Einstein is sitting next to you the whole day and helping out Theory of Bounded Rationality applies.