alt Hacker NewsIt depends on what you mean by “Opus-like”, because if you mean “as strong as Opus 4.6 for agentic coding” then Qwen3.8-27B has been there for the past two months.
But if you mean “as strong as current-gen Opus” then it's probably never gonna happen, but it doesn't really matter since we're long into the diminishing returns for performance improvements: I haven't notice any major leap between 4.6 and 5.5 in my daily usage, and I'm convinced that with a fact enough piecs of hardware I would be using local Qwen exclusively (I'm using it daily but only at night for long running tasks because they take much more time than Opus due to the compounding effects of my slow GPU and Qwen's verbosity).
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The most visible leap between 4.6 and 5.5 seems to be that the latter has gotten much more computer-use training, so there's a clear progression in the ability for the model to use Blender. But catching up on that is just a matter of training on the same thing.
Opus 5.5 was a step function change. Really crushes on multi-hour coding compared with prior models.