I've had a good experience with GLM-5.1. Sure it doesn't match xhigh but comes close to 4.6 at 1/3rd the cost

That's a lame attitude. There are local models that are last year's SOTA, but that's not good enough because this year's SOTA is even better yet still...

I've said it before and I'll say it again, local models are "there" in terms of true productive usage for complex coding tasks. Like, for real, there.

The issue right now is that buying the compute to run the top end local models is absurdly unaffordable. Both in general but also because you're outbidding LLM companies for limited hardware resources.

You have a $10K budget, you can legit run last year's SOTA agentic models locally and do hard things well. But most people don't or won't, nor does it make cost effective sense Vs. currently subsidized API costs.

GLM 5.1 competes with Sonnet. I'm not confident about Opus, though they claim it matches that too.