What's the use case here? Churning out massive amounts of slop code through autonomous agents? Running openclaw 24/7? I think the proliferation of codex and claude code, compared to any of the cheaper open models suggests that at least for most software development, the 50-75% discount of open models isn't worth the hassle of the decreased intelligence.
My use case would primarily be in search, integration, and indexing other software projects with my own, as well as transcription/indexing of interesting video and audio content (eg Dwarkesh interviews) that I don’t have time to watch but want to easily search and apply to my projects, and search/indexing for useful information from things like Linux kernel and security mailing lists. Basically there is a lot of stuff that, if the cost were low enough, I would point a reasonably intelligent AI at to distill out useful information and apply it to my projects, or just cherry pick the interesting things out and surface them to me so I don’t have to wade through all the mundane stuff and man-made slop getting in the way.
All of that feels like something that a $20 chatgpt pro subscription is for, maybe with slightly better tool use capabilities. There's no way that a $4000 purchase on a GPU would ever be worth it if all you're doing is running a handful of queries per day.
I don't use it for coding, I have $20 Gemini, $20 codex, etc.
But then I got the framework board for $1700, now it's $2700
Free for approximately 8 hours (assuming perfect weather conditions) and excluding unit cost and maintenance cost.
It has a cost.
