I really hope that in a couple of years I can have a laptop that runs a reasonably good coding agent locally, that I can run fast and do most of my programming with, without running my laptop hot. I could keep open code and use other models when needed, but really for most of my work, I'm already breaking it down so that I can review code changes eventually, and I just need something reasonably decent and fast and unlimited. I think its coming.
I hope so too. But I fear that it will feel inadequate if we know there is always a $20 online model that is an order of magnitude better. I don't think there will be a "good enough" local model so long as frontier models look so much better.
Seems like most people have settled on Opus 4.6 as the breaking point (me as well).
Once I can spend 10k to run Opus 4.6 at home, I'm done.
I'm very optimistic here as well. And it's also worth noting that tooling is improving along with the models. I really think we have to treat models and tools as a package. The models is your engine, but you need a chassis to run it.
I find what makes frontier models actually work well isn't just the capability of the model, but how well the harness is tuned to its expectations. I wrote a about this in a bit more detail here. https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-06-08-dirge-code.html