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I think we are inevitably heading to using the cheap Chinese models like Kimi, GLM, and Minimax for the bulk of engineering tasks. Within 3-6 months they will b
by operatingthetan 6mo ago
I think we are inevitably heading to using the cheap Chinese models like Kimi, GLM, and Minimax for the bulk of engineering tasks. Within 3-6 months they will be at Opus 4.6 level.
- robertkarl 6mo agoThis was literally my task today, to try out Qwen 9B locally on my, albeit a bit memory-constrained at 18GB, macbook with pi or opencode. Before reading this update.
- someuser54541 6mo agoPlease report back, would be very interested in your findings.
- sshine 6mo agoI ran OpenCode + GLM-5.1 for three weeks during my vacation. It’s okay. It thinks a lot more to get to a similar result as Claude. So it’s slower. It’s congested during peak hours. It has quirks as the context gets close to full. But if you’re stuck with no better model, it’s better than local models and no models. I have to say, OpenCode’s OpenUI has taught me what modern TUIs can be like. Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed. I’m playing around with TUI widgets trying to recreate and improve that experience
- taikon 6mo agoTo be clear, was OpenCode a better in your opinion compared to ClaudeCode?
- sshine 6mo agoBetter UI, worse model (GLM), probably slightly worse agentic runtime. In spite of how glitchy Claude feels, it makes decisions fast.
- TacticalCoder 6mo ago> I have to say, OpenCode’s OpenUI has taught me what modern TUIs can be like. Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed. Claude's TUI is not a TUI. It's the most WTF thing ever: the TUI is actually a GUI. A headless browser shipped the TUI that, in real-time, renders the entire screen, scrolls to the bottom, and converts that to text mode. There are several serious issues and I'll mention two that do utterly piss me off... 1. Insane "jumping" around where the text "scrolls back" then scrolls back down to your prompt: at this point, seen the crazy hack that TUI is, if you tell me the text jumping around in the TUI is because they're simulating mouse clicks on the scrollbar I would't be surprised. If I'm not mistaken we've seen people "fixing" this by patching other programs (tmux ?). 2. What you see in the TUI is not the output of the model. That is, to me, the most insane of it all. They're literally changing characters between their headlessly rendered GUI and the TUI. > Claude’s TUI feels more like it’s been grown than designed. "grown" or "hacked" are way too nice words for the monstrosity that Claude's TUI is. Codex is described as a: "Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal". It's 95%+ Rust code. I wonder if the "lightweight" is a stab at the monstrosity that Claude's TUI is.
- robertkarl 6mo agoFor what it's worth: here's my experience in the first 10 minutes of using Qwen locally to write some code. https://github.com/robertkarl/local-qwen-first-10-minutes https://github.com/robertkarl/local-qwen-first-10-minutes it includes some token generation numbers and steps to repro.
- operatingthetan 6mo agoMinimax coding plan is $10 a month for roughly 3x the $20 Claude Pro CLI usage allowed. That would be good place to start. 200k context though.
- hank2000 6mo agohow was it? I'm doing this today
- robertkarl 6mo agoI will report back... but I have to recommend this comment on a post about Qwen 3.6 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47843466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47843466 by daemonologist it goes into detail about llama-server args; quants to try; and layer/kv cache splits. I plan to try the techniques there.
- try-working 6mo agoKimi K3 in July-September is the big one.
- kzisme 6mo agoHow challenging are these to setup locally and have them running?
- operatingthetan 6mo agoGetting them running is easy (check out LMstudio or ask one for some recommendations). The real question is whether you have the hardware to make them run fast enough to be useful.
- kzisme 6mo agoThe min req is probably crazy I assume but I'll take a peek :)
- maxnevermind 6mo agoAnthropic will kick and scream as those are often distilled from their latest models and is cutting into their margin. Though it is not like their hands are clean neither, it is just a different type of stealing, an approved one :-)
- muyuu 6mo agoKimi 2.6 works roughly like Opus 4.6, when it used to work. Depending on the task, a bit better or a bit worse. And it's MUCH cheaper.
- toasty228 6mo agoFrom this morning: I had a single go file with like 100 loc, I asked it to add debug prints, it thought for 5+ minutes, generating ~1m output token and did not actually update my file.
- slopinthebag 6mo agoWhich harness? Did you use OpenRouter?
- AussieWog93 6mo agoThis is possibly a hot take but recently I've been having about as much luck with Composer 2 in Cursor as I have with Opus 4.6 in Claude Code. Opus is obviously the better model, but Cursor's "harness" is doing so much heavy lifting in terms of just magically supplying the broader context the model needs to understand the ramifications of its edits.