I disagree with every part of this.

Local LLMs are great and very useful but if you are claiming that their code quality is in the same ballpark as Claude Code or Codex with their best models I cannot consider you a serious person. I feel like this is analogous to the folks arguing that The Cloud is "someone else's computer." As if billions of dollars of spend gives these companies zero benefit over a Mac mini.

Regarding offshore, at least in my experience, better coding agent output is down to two factors. First, is subject matter expertise. Providing the right context to the coding agent based on the tech you are building for is beyond critical. That's the issue with the Vibe Coded slop projects. No expertise in a technology means no awareness of gotchas, React is the most obvious because the LLM default is to useEffect endlessly.

The bigger issue is that by their very nature LLMs are very sensitive to quality prompting in English. I have seen offshore devs fail endlessly because they don't have the English skills to successfully prompt the machine. That has caused more work for my US based devs to either carefully tune the work ticket so it is basically a coding agent prompt. Or to go through multi day exercises to enforce better prompting.

A single US dev with Claude Code is orders of magnitude better than typical offshore. Adding local models into the mix would make offshore completely useless. I'm sure many companies will see ballooning AI bills and expensive onshore devs and be very tempted to go to TCS or similar. I hope so, because that will give startups plenty of easy targets to disrupt.