It's definitely not the case that small models only do well in benchmarks. We're working on a battle system on top of OpenCode, so have data for real people doign real work.

Right now DeepSeek Flash 4.1 Flash has a 64% win rate against GPT 6.1 Sol. Small data still, but it has 33 wins vs. 18 losses, which is confidence interval of 52% - 78% win rate. https://agentduel.com/leaderboard/models/deepseek/deepseek-v...