Claude started becoming useful for my coding purposes after it hit version 4.6. After that sure some nice to have additions but I think if I had 4.6 sonnet & opus as open weights, I would not need something more.
Having played a bit with Fable, reinforced the above.
Yeah for me the coding inflection point was relatively recently (GPT 5.3 perhaps). There's just a threshold they have to hit to be consistent enough to avoid having to redo work and only the later models started delivering it.
This certainly seems feasible for open weight models eventually, but I'm still extremely skeptical of the claims about reaching this level with any open weight model that can be run locally (nevermind the hardware costs to do so practically).
I agree and I'd love for local models to hat the sonnet 4.6 level but nothing seems really all that close, and I'm not particularly excited about giving money to deepseek.