I think we are at this point where the hard ceiling of a strong model is pretty hard to delineate reliably (at least in coding, in research work it's clearer ofc) - and in a good sense, meaning with suitable task decomposition or a test harness or a good abstraction you can make the model do what you thought it could not. StepFun is a strong model and I really enjoyed studying and comparing it to others by coding pretty complex projects semi-autonomously (will do a write up on this soon tm).
Even purely pragmatically, StepFun covers 95% of my research+SWE coding needs, and for the remaining 5% I can access the large frontier models. I was surprised StepFun is even decent at planning and research, so it is possible to get by with it and nothing else (1), but ofc for minmaxing the best frontier model is still the best planner (although the latest deepseek is surprisingly good too).
Finally we are at a point where there is a clear separation of labor between frontier & strong+fast models, but tbh shoehorning StepFun into this "strong+fast" category feels limiting, I think it has greater potential.
I pay for copilot to access anthropic, google and openai models.
Claude code always give me rate limits. Claude through copilot is a bit slow, but copilot has constant network request issues or something, but at least I don't get rate limited as often.
At least local models always work, is faster (50+ tps with qwen3.5 35b a4b on a 4090) and most importantly never hit a rate limit.
But qwen3.5 35b is worse than even Claude Haiku 4.5. You could switch your Claude Code to use Haiku and never hit rate limits. Also gets similar 50tps.
I haven't tried 4.5 haiku much, but i was not impressed with previous haiku versions.
My goto proprietary model in copilot for general tasks is gemini 3 flash which is priced the same as haiku.
The qwen model is in my experience close to gemini 3 flash, but gemini flash is still better.
Maybe it's somewhat related to what we're using them for. In my case I'm mostly using llms to code Lua. One case is a typed luajit language and the other is a 3d luajit framework written entirely in luajit.
I forgot exactly how many tps i get with qwen, but with glm 4.7 flash which is really good (to be local) gets me 120tps and a 120k context.
Don't get me wrong, proprietary models are superior, but local models are getting really good AND useful for a lot of real work.
I also started playing with 3.5 Flash and was impressed.
It’s 2× faster than its competitors. For tasks where “one-shotting” is unrealistic, a fast iteration loop makes a measurable difference in productivity.
