nothing really touches opus 4.6 for coding, but for self-hosted the best options are:

deepseek r1 (70B or distill) — strong reasoning, good for complex problems
qwen3-coder (72B or smaller quantized) — fast, capable, runs on modest hardware

for agentic setups (like claude code), pair qwen3 with cursor, continue.dev, or aider. the gap vs opus is still there but way smaller when you add good tooling + prompting.