Open-weights AI models have become good enough

Over the past week I've played around with Kimi K3 by Moonshot AI and Qwen 3.8 Max by Alibaba. Both are large Chinese open-weight models (weights promised to be released soon) and tout benchmarks showing they're as capable as the frontier western models (Fable 5 by Anthropic and GPT-5.5 Sol by OpenAI). I wouldn't go that far, but these are really capable models. In my AI-coding tests, both have performed really well. Compare the test mini-games on my vibe-coding benchmark generated by Fable, Sol, K3 and Qwen. In a more serious test, building a web app to a provided spec, K3, Qwen and Fable generated very similar results. An AI judge (GPT-5.5 Sol via Codex) gave a positive code review to all three (of course, it did find some problems and room for improvement), with Fable being slightly better. “Good enough” is great! What I am most excited about, though, is that the open-weights models have reached the threshold of “good enough” for serious AI-assisted engineering. The Anthropic and…