I largely don't disagree with you but come to a different conclusion. I have two systems:

1) a "programming desktop" with a $500 upper mid range Ryzen (idr exact), 8GB VRAM Radeon card I bought solely for RuneScape, and 64GB ram

2) a maxed out Alienware 16 Area51, so it's a 5090 with 24GB vram and 64GB system ram. I bought it for gaming, of course.

I run qwen 3.6 35B A3B Q6 with 200k context window. I compare this to Claude pro max or whatever that I use at work.

The main difference between the machines is that the one with the RuneScape gpu does 10 TPS while the Alienware does 30-40tps. Both are fine though the 30-40tps is obviously a lot snappier.

I find with both models that:

- they do really well at "be a 30GB zip file of reddit and stackoverflow answers"

- they do really well at point fixing random bullshit errors that would otherwise waste my time (this is related to above of course)

- they do quite well at, given a pretty good specification of what you want, figuring it out, even if you've specified several steps needed

- they both cannot really be given a large ish task and left to just drive it on their own

The main difference between the two is with that last one, Claude is somewhat better and figuring SOMETHING out, but if Claude is having to figure it out, it's probably because I don't know what I want and it's very likely to not make a sane choice, and will generally produce slop given even the slightest amount of leash still.

I've also found that the boundary between "well specified small to medium thing" and "idk just do thing and figure it out" is the difference between you keeping control of the code and losing control. There's an "escape velocity" of AI use that, when you hit it, you're doomed to slop forever. (Or you have to deorbit... enjoy that). And while claude might have slightly higher velocity allowed while remaining suborbital, it's very diminishing returns.

So, are these models "worse" than Claude? Yeah. Am I looking forward to continued improvements? Yeah. But I now also have no desire to pay anthropic any amount of money, which has the nice side effect that i won't be helping them end up with so much money that they can distort our democracy.