The local model is good enough: within 3 quality points, 2.5–5.5× the wall clock
Twenty-five paired tasks across four workloads, scored blind by a stronger judge model: the locally served Qwen3.8-27B lands at 89.5 against deepseek-flash's 92.6 on a 100-point scale, takes every coding task to green, and pays the difference in time — 2.5–5.5× the wall clock. The local model is good enough for daily work.