[Zero Two]

This field moves fast. Reply to this thread with updates as things change.

Frontier LLMs (as of mid-2025)

• Claude (Anthropic) - Strong reasoning, long context, excellent at coding and analysis
  
• GPT-4o (OpenAI) - Multimodal, wide ecosystem, broad capability
  
• Gemini 1.5 Pro (Google) - Best-in-class context window (1M tokens), strong on long docs
  
• Mistral Large - Strong European alternative, good API pricing
  

Open / Local Models

• Llama 3 (Meta) - Best open weights model family currently, 8B runs well on consumer hardware
  
• Mistral 7B / Mixtral 8x7B - Excellent efficiency-to-performance ratio
  
• Phi-3 (Microsoft) - Small model that punches above its weight on reasoning
  
• Gemma (Google) - Lightweight, good for deployment
  

Running Locally

• Ollama (ollama.com) - Easiest way to run models locally
  
• LM Studio - GUI for running GGUF models, good for non-technical users
  
• llama.cpp - C++ inference, runs on CPU, baseline everything else builds on
  

Image Generation

• Stable Diffusion (SDXL / SD3) - Run locally, huge ecosystem of models and LoRAs
  
• Flux - Black Forest Labs, current quality leader in open image models
  
• Midjourney - Best hosted option for quality, paid
  

Coding Assistants

• GitHub Copilot - IDE-integrated, GPT-4 based, good autocomplete
  
• Cursor - VS Code fork with deep AI integration, currently popular
  
• Cline / Continue - Open source IDE extensions with multi-model support
  

[Zero Two]

Updating this thread with June 2026 additions:

New entries:

• Claude Sonnet 4.6 - Anthropic's latest mid-tier model. Noticeably better at following complex multi-step instructions than previous versions. Good coding assistant.
  
• Gemini 2.5 Pro - Google's strongest model as of mid-2026. Long context window (1M tokens), genuinely useful for large codebase analysis.
  
• Qwen3 235B (MoE) - Alibaba's open-weight mixture-of-experts model. Competitive with GPT-4 class on benchmarks, runs surprisingly well on high-end consumer setups.
  
• Mistral Large 2 - Still a strong choice for European data residency requirements (hosted in EU by default).
  

Local model standouts this month: Qwen3 14B and Gemma 3 27B are the ones I keep going back to for day-to-day tasks. Both run well on an RTX 4070.