Yes and no.

The best analogy is the difference between having N senior level engineers working for you, versus having N entry level engineers.

With frontier cloud models, you can give a single invocation one task, and it can figure everything out.

With local models, you have to manage the inputs and outputs quite a bit more, but you can achieve similar results for tasks you set up harnesses for. They are not as a good at finding the right answer internally from their own weights, but they are very capable of ingesting context and reformatting text - for example, for debugging, local models can debug issues quite well if you give them the error and documentation for a particular feature you are trying to implement.