Using an open model feels surprisingly good

This is an ad.

I know the author has a long history here and I'm sure the post is a genuine reflection. But how is posting "I used my own product and it felt really good" anything other than self promotion?

The reason Claude code is so popular is because it’s really good at taking super vague human prose “Claude build me a million dollar SaaS”-type prompts and spitting out thousands of lines of code which cover tons of surface-level edge cases, build in tons of functionality, etc

The smaller/open models are less good at that. But that’s not how software development is done. You don’t prompt a whole app and be done with it. If you’re using it as an aid to traditional software dev, iterating on small, targeted functions, GLM works as good if not better than Claude. Anthropic expects low quality prompts. If you rubber duck GLM, you get absolutely pristine output in most cases.

To be honest, I am surprised by how good DeepSeek V4 Flash is. I use Claude Code and Codex on Claude 5 Opus and GPT-5.6 Sol most of the time, but when I use DS V4 Flash I don't feel like it's really that bad. And with oh-my-pi and just plain pi it's pretty good. To be honest the frontier models are much better at tool calling so in an assistant flow they're better but I did the dumb thing and optimized the harness for the model instead, rewriting the tools so they match what it guesses at, and DS V4 Flash does just fine.

The TTFT and tok/s are much higher on the small model so that makes it competitive for a bunch of things. It feels like what old Sonnet used to by the end of last year which is honestly damned good.

This is only a thinly veiled ad. It's fine, I was curious about this exact setup, anyways.

What would be useful is a cost metric. I'm curious how much I'd be willing to spend as a premium to not have those companies piping my conversations directly to the NSA. Maybe only some conversations? Claude and OpenAI are heavily subsidized, by all accounts, so Kimi K3 on a private endpoint might end up costing more or less - that's what I want to know.

GLM 5.2 feels better than Opus and K3 is as good as Fable.

Now I can't wait for someone to distill K3 into a Qwen 3.6 27b or Poolside S 2.1 sized models for a proper fast local Composer 2.5 replacement.

I love OpenCode and the blankness of it too. Clean, light, and manual. It's a good change of pace from what we are used to on the internet (very cool but slow). Also, can you hmu with that modal plan XD

this seems to be an advertisement for Modal. is it really your own infrastructure if the hardware is leased?

> The best way I can describe it is like opening vim after spinning a bunch of time in a big fancy editor.

Harness-aside, I get this feeling sometimes when I swap from a big frontier model to something more nimble like Composer.

I can get into a better thinking and q&a loop with fast models, similar to how I can flow through a file more easily with vim.

Looks like everyone is hoping that Chinese AI wins over AI from Trump's land.

Open models are improving rapidly. The real question is how long the gap with frontier models will remain

I’ve enjoyed using Kimi K3. The biggest issue for me so far is finding a good harness. Claude Code is excellent for tasks that require backgrounding processes/agents, or fanning out. Codex and OpenCode I’ve found to be less capable.

Something I've been thinking about a lot is that this new technology's primary UI is natural language. Human's are REALLY primed for natural language.

If it sounds good it must be good. The code this new model writes is incredible! It told me so!

you can use claude code or codex with open models using AllRouter https://github.com/Lore-Hex/AllRouter

the most expensive model is the one you're too afraid to actually use

Actually, if you break tasks down into small enough units, there's not much difference between open models and closed models. The only reason to use agents is the hope that they'll work with natural language input—but that's where the difficulty lies.

For example, if you modify things at the level of small functions, open models seem to perform just as wel

It surprises me that this concept took as long as it did to gain traction in… hacker news. 15 years ago folks here were compiling kernels and gentoo distros. Lately it’s been “you should just pay the man, it’s cheaper than running these things yourself”

This is such a poor quality post, reads more like a diary entry than a substantive technical post.

[flagged]