There is absolutely a use case for open models... but anyone expecting to get anywhere near the GPT 5.x or Claude 4.x experience for more demanding tasks (read: anything beyond moderate-difficulty coding) will be sorely disappointed.

I love my little hobby aquarium though... It's pretty impressive when Qwen Coder Next and Qwen 3.5 122B can accomplish (in terms of general agentic use and basic coding tasks), considering that the models are freely-available. (Also heard good things about Qwen 3.5 27B, but haven't used it much... yes I am a Qwen fanboi.)