Opinion: Just say no to OpenAI and Anthropic, use open weights
A personal blog post, upvoted past 100 points on Hacker News, argues that developers should stop relying on OpenAI and Anthropic and instead use open-weight models with private inference services. The author, a software and security engineer, writes that his vibe-based impression is that GLM-5.3 is roughly on par with Claude Opus 5.5 for software engineering, and describes using GLM-5.3, DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi and Mistral Large 4 through Tinfoil, Maple AI and OpenCode Go. He criticizes the two US labs' closed models, strict cybersecurity guardrails and gated "trusted access" approval programs, and cites a Reuters report that Z.ai's ZCode coding harness silently uploaded local source code.
It captures a growing developer argument that open-weight models plus secure-enclave inference are now a workable alternative to the two leading US labs.