Hacker News
points by Zambyte 2 days ago | 0 comments
How much do people actually do that demands the capabilities of Claude instead of open models that can run on hardware in the range of thousands of dollars (which is not that much when the alternative is hundreds of dollars a month, indefinitely)?

People chasing the best of the best models for all tasks in order to "keep up" are only wasting resources at this point.

Regarding similar features, there are lots of off the shelf harnesses that support all that, or can easily be extended (literally just ask your agent) to do it.

[–] jitl 2 days ago
i am 100% sure i need opus 5.5 model to build stuff like this because i try lesser models because i want my tokens to go farther and lesser models simply cannot: https://fujimod.com
[–] lp92 1 day ago
Not sure if this is possible on the Fuji, but back in the old days of the Canon PowerShot being very relevant, there was CHDK firmware which ran off the SD card on boot. No physical impact to the device and fully reversible by reformatting the SD card. This would be the way to go to reduce bricking chances.
[–] jitl 23 hours ago
yeah i currently only distribute sd card dual boot media where the the install process is “turn it on holding REC and pressing rear command dial” and uninstall process is “turn it off”
[–] Zambyte 2 days ago
> All of this is unreviewed vibe-coded slop that could be hazardous to your camera’s mental, emotional, or digital health. If you're uncomfortable with risk to your camera, please don't use it.

You don't care anyways. Actual engineering works "100%" fine with small models now. You should try it!

[–] lp92 1 day ago
I've tried smaller models and the best open models for a specialized UAV focused CAD + CFD + DFM optimization application I'm building.

The best open weights models still had a lot of defects and very egregious mistakes to fix even after I provided a very well detailed Requirement/Design/ Technical Implementation plans.

Opus and Gemini 3.8 (and now Argon) did a significantly better job. So I've baseline using these two models to build this application. I now use Opus for design/review and Flash 3.8 for the code gen/implementation work.

I'm sure small models and even open big models are probably fine for many common small apps and such, but they aren't really able to perform the same across all use cases.

[–] jitl 2 days ago
as i said, i did try it. smaller models are not up to the task of deep reverse engineering work.