In practice, I've found the economics work like this:

1. Code generation (boilerplate, tests, migrations) - smaller models are fine, and latency matters more than peak capability 2. Architecture decisions, debugging subtle issues - worth the cost of frontier models 3. Refactoring existing code - the model needs to "understand" before changing, so context and reasoning matter more

The 3B active parameters claim is the key unlock here. If this actually runs well on consumer hardware with reasonable context windows, it becomes the obvious choice for category 1 tasks. The question is whether the SWE-Bench numbers hold up for real-world "agent turn" scenarios where you're doing hundreds of small operations.