Senior engineer: are local LLMs worth it yet for real coding work?

I know this comes up a lot, and I’ve gone through a bunch of the older threads, but I’m still having a hard time figuring out what actually makes sense for my situation. I’m a senior software engineer working as an independent contractor, and a lot of my clients don’t allow cloud LLMs anywhere near their codebases. Because of that, I’ve been following local LLMs for a while, but I still can’t tell whether they’re actually good enough for serious coding / agentic workflows in a professional setting. I keep seeing GPT-oss-120B recommended, but my experience with it hasn’t been great.