Some of the local models are effectively there. It depends on what scale you need or want. Kimi 2.6 is up there with opus, granted it's huge. On some benches it's actually better. Qwen3.6 is up there with sonnet but it's nearly microscopic. A lot has changed in the last month

Only if you're vibe coding, with ambiguous prompts that require the model to fill in a huge number of gaps and basically write the software for you.

The people who don't really know what they're doing (or don't care) need the full power of the SOTA models, those with experience can provide enough context and instruction to make even small local models work.