Meanwhile, you can always buy hardware like a Strix Halo and have local LLMs that no third party can take away from you.
Even then, the frontier models would likely have improved by an equivalent degree, so you'd again be faced with the same choice of deciding between a dramatically less effective local tool and a far more capable, closed remote model.
I guess there's going to be some point of "good enough" for most people.
I feel like the closed frontier models really got there around 8 months ago and then even moreso ~4-6 months ago with the release of the Codex series and then opus 4.6. Finally feels like you can get reliably good implementations of features that follow repo patterns and best practices, and at least with 5.4 High/Xhigh Codex, code reviews that don't mostly surface hallucinated or superficial bullshit.
While I'm rambling, I feel like when/if local models ever do catch up to this point, the frontier models are going to be so damn good that software devs are truly fucked.
I think a lot of people just want to put in a credit card and press an easy button.
People can definitely be productive with less powerful models. Supermaven or Cursor's tab autocomplete models from a year ago were already a huge boost over the pre-AI days. They just don't have the same capabilities as the leading models.
Curious if you've tried Gpt 5.4 High through Codex to compare for your use case?
You give LLMs a dedicated OS to work in, let them do research or debugging and commit to branches, review and clean up those branches as you like from a trusted OS, then sign the commits and mark a PR as ready for review.
