Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems to vary by person. I get immense value in coding assistance from Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B which is like a frontier model from a year ago. But a lot of people say it’s stupid, useless, a toy, etc. I do work by the “short leash” method and mainly just use the model for brainstorming/planning/design assistance and zipping through the drudgery of boilerplate and executing refactors. I don’t think this tier of model is…
Caveat: I have not been able to try that model locally, so no personal experience. Running this locally at usable speeds would be cost prohibitive for personal coding use for me. But if we can believe you that it's doing what a Claude model was doing a year ago then I'd say: OMG no I really never want to go back to that level of frustration getting an agent to do what I want it to do.
While it probably won't matter enough to change your mind, remember that you've gotten better at extracting value from all models than you were a year ago - plus the harnesses and other tools have gotten a lot better too.