alt Hacker NewsYou can't replicate Opus 5.5 at home.
You can maybe replicate Opus 4.5 to 4.7 if you have some moderately expensive hardware. And that is definitely good enough for many people.
The smallest model that can even pretend to be a decent coding model is Qwen3.8 27B, which you realistically need 32GB of VRAM to run without breaking or limiting it in some really noticeable way. This gets you something like a slightly less capable Opus 4.5 with a much better work ethic.
Strata and Qwen 3.8 flash next is an 180B model running at 70 tps on my 5070 ti and 64gb of DDR4 RAM at Q3 quants and so far I can't tell much difference between it and any other non local model for my workflows/coding needs. Not saying local is better all the time, but it's certainly a lot more capable with minimal hardware than you're giving it credit for. Qwen 4.0 is right around the corner too.