Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • Just want to say that I faced this very problem the last week, I discovered OpenCode agent and it works great, with DeepSeek and other models. Try it out guys.
    by izietto
  • Pi will blow your mind :)
    by column
  • Try https://swival.dev - Works perfectly with DeepSeek and Qwen.
    by jedisct1
  • Get comfortable with Deepseek's privacy policy for using this for anything serious.

    "To improve and develop the Services and to train and improve our technology, such as our machine learning models and algorithms. Including by monitoring interactions and usage across your devices, analyzing how people are using it, and training and improving our technology."

    https://cdn.deepseek.com/policies/en-US/deepseek-privacy-pol...

    by iosjunkie
  • Did... Did you just ask an AI to one-shot something that normally amounts to no more than setting two env variables?
    by dopeepsreaddocs
  • It's surprisingly easy to hit $200 worth of tokens even at ~$1/M token though. No matter how many times I do the math the coding plans are the better value.
    by TheServitor
  • I don't think it surprisingly easy at all unless you are running multiple background tasks overnight, I think Gemini will eventually be the default agentic coding agent in the future when it comes to price and efficiency because its backed by sound money.

    I don't use the Claude Code harness, grep instead of using a combination of vector search is super expensive and not sure how their read file implementation is. I built my own harness for example that restrict reads and writes in a token efficient manner. Building your own harness will always be the cheapest option in the long run.

    My own harness, minimalistic GUI gets the job done nothing too fancy https://slidebits.com/isogen

    by ojr
  • > DeepSeek V4 Pro scores 96.4% on LiveCodeBench and costs $0.87/M output tokens.

    Yes and this is a temporary discount which increases to 3.48 USD on 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC.

    Source: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing

    by l5870uoo9y
  • If you're okay with sonnet level performance, this sounds like a straight upgrade. But I find that sonnet messes up too much, that it ends up not being worth cost optimizing down to using it or another sonnet-level model. Glad to have this as an option though
    by _345
  • This has been my experience working on tsz.dev. Only Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5 can really be productive for the remaining test cases.
    by mohsen1
  • I don’t find this with sonnet at all. As long as I have a solid Claude.md and periodically review the output and enforce good code practices via basic CI gates I’ve rarely ever found myself having to switch to opus
    by willio58
  • We're not yet at a point of saturation when all the frontier models would be of somewhat comparable "intelligence" and we could decide which to use based on other factors (speed, effective context window etc.), so I honestly don't see why would you (as a company or an employee) not use the best available model with the highest (or at least second highest) thinking effort. The fees are not exactly cheap, but not that expensive either.
    by Culonavirus
  • This is the problem: you need the best model, not just a good one, for: - Good architecture, which requires reading specs, code, etc. reads like: lots of tokens in/out - Bug fixing — same, plus logs, e.g. datadog

    Once you've found the path, patches are trivial and the savings are tiny unless you're doing refactoring/cleanup.

    testing gets more and more complicated. Take a look at opencode go, and you see this:

    >Includes GLM-5.1, GLM-5, Kimi K2.5, Kimi K2.6, MiMo-V2-Pro, MiMo-V2-Omni, MiMo->V2.5-Pro, MiMo-V2.5, Qwen3.5 Plus, Qwen3.6 Plus, MiniMax M2.5, MiniMax M2.7, >DeepSeek V4 Pro, and DeepSeek V4 Flash

    and now on your own with bugs, all of these models can produce at scale. Am i missing anything in this picture. What is the real use of cheaper models?

    by maxdo
  • I keep re-learning this lesson: I chug along with a lesser model then throw a problem at it that's too complex. Then I try different models until I give up and bring in Opus 4.6 to clean up.
    by chrsw
  • A lot of people are having good experiences doing things like using opus for designing and using locally hosted qwen3.6 for implementation.

    I could see a serious cost reduction story by using opus for design and deepseek for implementation.

    Personally I would avoid anthropic entirely. But I get why people don't.

    by 2ndorderthought
  • > Claude Code is the best autonomous coding agent.

    If you look at the terminal-bench@2.0 leaderboard, you'll quickly see it's actually one of the weakest agentic harnesses. Anthropic's own models score lower with Claude Code than with virtually any other harness.

    So it's quite the opposite. Claude Code is arguably the worst harness to run models with.

    by isege
  • Then the benchmarks are wrong.
    by andxor
  • Those benches are completely and totally meaningless when it comes down to real world work tasks, and everyone knows it.
    by cpursley
  • Okay, but not all results on there are valid, ForgeCode for instance has been cheating in the past:

    https://debugml.github.io/cheating-agents/#sneaking-the-answ...

    by DaanDL
  • Not sure you can replace Claude with DeepSeek V4 that easily and have same results.

    From what I see while building my own agentic system in Elixir, the problem is in training for your specific harness/contracts. Claude/GPT-style models seem to be trained around very specific contracts used by the harness like tool call formats, planning structure, patching, reading files, recovering from errors, and knowing when to stop.

    In practice, you either need a very strong general model that can infer and follow those contracts (expensive), or a weaker model that has been fine-tuned / trained specifically on your own agent contracts. Otherwise, the whole thing becomes flaky very quickly. And I suspect with Deepseek V4 you may get last options.

    by syntex
  • I hope they collaborate with open source harness providers (Pi, Opencode) and train models with those. So next generations will have better integration and better overall quality.
    by dandaka
  • There are certainly quirks, but identifying and conforming to those quirks is not that complex. E.g. I had Kimi "fix" my harness to work better with Kimi by pointing it at the (open source) kimi-cli + web search and telling it to figure out which differences might matter (it made compaction more aggressive, and worked around some known looping issues (by triggering compaction if it spotted looping tool calls). Largely addressing the quirks tend to harden the harness for other models too. But, yeah, it is more work to make the smaller models work with instead of against the harness.
    by vidarh
  • I love to learn more about the system you’re building out in Elixir and your learnings if any of it is public.
    by cpursley
  • Idk, my recent experience with Claude is that 4.7 barely knows how to use basic bash tools - how to properly check when programs have finished running, even basic stuff like how to run pytest suites and read the failed tests from the output without re-running the suite to specifically look for them. It's shockingly dumb for all of the tooling they've built into Claude Code (the useless Monitoring tool that blocks bash polling/sleeping that actually works, etc.).

    I finally get fed up and started using GPT 5.5 the past 4 days and its a breath a fresh air despite feeling much more minimal. With Claude I had to write so many hooks to enforce behaviors it wouldn't remember and it lacked common sense on. GPT 5.5 does a much better job with things like knowing the AWS CDK CLI can hang on long CloudFormation deployments and it should actively check the deployment status using CloudFormation API rather than hanging for 30+ minutes - and it does this all without asking.

    Maybe there's better tooling built into Codex too, but at least on the surface level it seems like how smart the model is makes a significant difference because Claude has more tools than I can count and still struggles to use "grep".

    Edit: Like just now - I can't tell you how many times I day I see this sequence:

    "Sorry, I'll run in parallel"

    "Error editing file"

    "File must be read first"

    Repeat 10x for the 10 subagents Claude spawned and then it gets stuck until you press escape and it says "You rejected the parallel agents. Running directly now"

    by o10449366
  • >DeepSeek V4 Pro scores 96.4% on LiveCodeBench and costs $0.87/M output tokens

    This is a heavily subsidized price and will only last until the end of the month: "The deepseek-v4-pro model is currently offered at a 75% discount, extended until 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC." [0]

    The "supported backends" table is also deceiving -- while OpenRouter's server's may be in the US, the only way to get the $0.44/$0.87 pricing is to pass through to the DeepSeek API, which of course is China-based. [1]

    I do think the model is quite good, I myself use it through Ollama Cloud for simple tasks. But I think some folks have bought in a little too much to the marketing hype around it.

    [0] https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing [1] https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro/providers

    by rsanek
  • They expect inference prices to structurally drop once they receive their big batch of Huawei Ascend chips by the second half of the year.
    by FooBarWidget
  • If you're looking for Claude Code alternatives, I would first suggest looking into pi.dev or opencode for your harness. And then for models, you can choose from OpenCode Go (IMO most cost effect at this moment), OpenRouter, or direct from DeepSeek. Better if you go the Kimi route IMO and just buy a subscription from kimi.com
    by justech
  • I liked pi.dev but why is registering endpoints and models not as simple as possible ? Or am i missing something ? I always have to fiddle with the config file.
    by mgoetzke
  • Another very cost-effective option is Ollama Cloud. In a month of use, I only hit the 5-hour limit once, when I ran 8 agents simultaneously for 2 hours.
    by aaurelions
  • How does the kimi subscription compare to Codex and Claude Code in terms of how much mileage you get for the pricing? I mean, I see the prices but not sure how usage that buys.
    by cpursley