Or something that goes against the general opinions of the community? Vibes are the only benchmark that counts after all.

I tend to agree with the flow on most things but my thoughts that I'd consider going against the grain:

• QwQ was think-slop and was never that good
• Qwen3-32B is still SOTA for 32GB and under. I cannot get anything to reliably beat it despite shiny benchmarks
• Deepseek is still open-weight SotA. I've really tried Kimi, GLM, and Qwen3's larger variants but asking Deepseek still feels like asking the adult in the room. Caveat is GLM codes better
• (proprietary bonus): Grok 4 handles news data better than GPT-5 or Gemini 2.5 and will always win if you ask it about something that happened that day.