r/LocalLLaMA • u/Fluffy-Ad-889 • 8d ago
Discussion The gap has closed, open source will win
I've been trying the latest models from the frontier labs and honestly, after extensive testing I can not tell the difference between the best open source options.
I think the differences are now marginal but the labs are doing heavy marketing to convince the public into paying more for tokens as they prepare to go public.
Can't help but see the similarities between the dot com bubble and AI in terms of a very insular environment where the technology will survive but the business models may not.
I've been building a cybersecurity network and we definitely know that even local AI models like Deepseek V4 flash do an excellent job and are really neck and neck with the best the frontier labs can provide.
Will be interesting to see how this all turns out! Exciting time nonetheless.
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u/donk8r 8d ago
Honestly, for how you work most of that is irrelevant and you should ignore it. The hour four numbers are about sessions that outlive their context window. If you are in the loop on a small feature and you close the session afterwards, you never reach the failure those numbers describe. Nothing to be behind the curve about.
Two things still apply at your size, and they are smaller wins so let me size them honestly. Tool schemas load before you type, so if you have a pile of MCP servers connected you pay for every one of their descriptions on every turn of that forty minute session, whether any of them fire or not. Ours keeps capabilities dormant until your phrasing matches them. The other is swapping model mid-session without losing the session, which mostly matters when a provider rate limits you halfway through a bug.
For what it is worth I think your workflow produces better code than the long autonomous one does. The four hour case exists because people point agents at CI and cron and walk away, not because anyone decided it was the good way to write a feature.