Industry
The Off Switch Summer: What June 2026 Taught Us About Who Really Controls Our Coding Models
On June 12 the US government switched off the best coding model in the world, and it stayed off for nineteen days. Then we found out Claude Code had been invisibly watermarking prompts since April. Then China shipped an open-weight model that tops the front-end coding leaderboard. We spent the last five weeks rebuilding our stack around one question: what happens to your project when the model goes away? Here is our answer, including which local models are actually good enough for client work.
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