Ultimately if you skip over the opportunity to play with these models on your own machine you are losing out on a lot of really interesting educational opportunities — it helps make a lot of stuff feel more concrete in a way that only tinkering can.
But then I think once I had an idea of something that I was building against Gemma 4 or Qwen 3.6 I would be looking at openrouter etc., to stabilise it for the next tier of experimentation (and to get back a kind of multi-device access without tailscale/lm link etc.).
Are they good enough to replace what people seem to want to do with Claude? Maybe not. But it's an unparalleled learning opportunity.
Ultimately if you skip over the opportunity to play with these models on your own machine you are losing out on a lot of really interesting educational opportunities — it helps make a lot of stuff feel more concrete in a way that only tinkering can.
But then I think once I had an idea of something that I was building against Gemma 4 or Qwen 3.6 I would be looking at openrouter etc., to stabilise it for the next tier of experimentation (and to get back a kind of multi-device access without tailscale/lm link etc.).
Are they good enough to replace what people seem to want to do with Claude? Maybe not. But it's an unparalleled learning opportunity.