> The problem is that it's much easier to use the SOTA models (especially if they are subsidized) instead of spending time fixing the knobs with the local one.

That's not a problem, that's a feature; I have something like 8 tabs open to different free-tier providers. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are the SOTA ones.

I have no problem maxing one out, then moving to the next. I can do this all day, have them implement specific functions (or classes) in my code. The things is, because I actually know how to write and design software, I don't need to run an agent in a loop to produce everything in a day, I can use the web chatbots with copy/paste to literally generate thousands of lines of code per hour while still having a strong mental model of the code that I can go in and change whatever I need to.[1]

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[1] Just did that this morning on a Python project: because I designed what I needed, each generation was me prompting for a single function. So when I needed to add something this morning I didn't even bother asking an chatbot to do it, I just went ahead directly to the correct place and did it.

You can't do that if you generate the entire thing from specs.