They really aren’t.

Have you used open weight models for serious jobs? Ones that you can actually run effectively on a Mac studio? (Not deepseek v4 pro, not Kimi K3, not GLM 5.3)

They work alright, at best, sometimes.

And the ones you can’t run effectively, locally, like Kimi K3 are considerably better at demanding tasks like software engineering. But even then they still suck at that job compared to frontier Anthropic and OpenAI models. I’ve been building with all of the above, and the open weight models just overall suck at serious high demand software workloads.