Do I really need to? No, not really. The 27B full density, 35B MoE, 70B and 122B models I have in use get me 95% of the way there on a lot of things. Particularly when dealing with languages and systems where I have at least an intermediate level of knowledge on, to know whether something is going down a dead end, using a wrong method, metaphorically chasing its tail, or is producing valid output.

On the other hand, would it be cool to also have a really big thing as an ancillary tool that I could throw a request into opencode before going to bed, let it crank away and take a look at what it's done 7 hours later? Yeah, particularly if I (very much an unknown quantity at this time) could be confident that it builds high quality, syntax valid, appropriately commented and not absurd code.

>Do you actually need to run the state of art model at 5 tokens per second instead of a qwen or whatever 7b or 30b model at 100 tokens per second?

Some people like doing things they want to do. Do I actually need to buy expensive pigments from europe to make paintings of flowers? My camera produces a much more accurate representation.

The whole mentality of thinking one knows better than another about what they need causes infinitely more problems than it solves.