Local Qwen 3.8 27B vs DeepSeek Flash API: Is local good enough?

Running a model on your own machine used to be a privacy story with a quality tax. On this generation that trade has narrowed to where we can state it plainly: for daily work, the local model is good enough. We measured it — 25 paired tasks across four workloads, same prompts, one strong independent judge — and that is the top line:

• quality: 89.5 vs 92.6 on a 100-point scale (local vs cloud), with the 12-item suite splitting six wins each;
• completion: every coding run finished green on both models — 10/10 agentic runs fully green (20/20 visible tests, 4/4 hidden checks, tests untouched), and the bug-fix loop fixed all 4 bugs identically in 5/5 rounds each;
• speed: 2.5–5.5× the wall clock, depending on the workload, with 95%+ of the local time going to model generation;
• cost: the local runs cost nothing beyond electricity. The cloud side of the 12-task suite cost 0.14 credits.