Comment by alyxya

3 hours ago

Once they have their own coding agent which they seem to be working towards, I may start predominantly using their models. They seem to be doing all the "right" things, open sourcing models, publishing research, and keeping prices low for everyone.

32 comments

alyxya

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smoe  1 few seconds ago

Earlier this week I started testing Chinese models on my codebase. I haven’t really looked at interactive coding yet, but more at issue triage, bug auto-fixing, log analytics, etc.

I used DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, Qwen, and MiMO against GPT-5.5 high as reference, all running in Pi harness without anything installed.

So far, Kimi and MiMO look the most promising to me. I haven’t tested them rigorously enough to make a strong statement, but my first impression is that, in practice, all those models may be less behind on typical daily tasks than people think.

They are a bit “work hard, not smart". Getting to same-ish results more slowly and using more tokens, but at a fraction of the price

ammar_x  2 hours ago

You can use V4 Pro with Claude Code [1].

I tried it and it's impressive.

[1]: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...

  • KronisLV  16 minutes ago

    I'm working on a custom launcher for hooking up Claude Code with various providers (groups env variables in profiles) cause DeepSeek doesn't have vision and sometimes I need browser use with screenshots or Opus reasoning, for other tasks it's fine: https://ccode.kronis.dev/

      # Once
  ccode init-config
  ccode edit-config
  
  # Run with default profile
  ccode
  # Run with named profile
  ccode --deepseek
  
  # Set default profile
  ccode set-default-profile deepseek

    Also turns out that with a local proxy you can get Remote Control working and see the DeepSeek sessions in the desktop app, screenshots on the page. Other than that, I'm happy that it works pretty well and the discount is enough to make me consider going from Anthropic's Max subscription to Pro and using it only where DeepSeek is insufficient. With that proxy I eventually hope to be able to transparently switch models mid-task, if I need Opus for like 5 turns or something.

    Overall though I'm not sure exactly how well Claude Code would stack up against OpenCode, since the latter overall feels a bit less hacky with 3rd party models and is even getting niche but nice features like a locally runnable web version: https://opencode.ai/docs/web/

  • thisisit  1 hour ago

    I am curious - Is there a way to switch between models depending on the task? Because I believe Deepseek V4 is not multimodal and it will be good to switch back to Claude if vision or other capabilities are required.

  • wiradikusuma  1 hour ago

    That's interesting. I thought Claude Code is not as good, therefore people want to use Claude model with other alternatives. This is the other way around.

    Which begs the question, regardless of the model, which Claude Code alternative is better? (I keep saying "Claude Code alternative" because I don't know the term... LLM CLI?)

    • flexagoon  16 minutes ago

      AFAIK the two most popular open source harnesses right now are OpenCode and Pi. They take a pretty different approach, OpenCode includes a lot of features while Pi is very minimal by design and focused on extensibility, to the point where many people are just asking Pi to write a plugin for itself whenever they want it to have a new feature. I personally like Pi's philosophy more and I think its developer justified the choices really well in his blog post:

      https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#to... (the pi-coding-agent section)

    • wrs  1 hour ago

      The common term for a tool that wraps an LLM with a workflow is “harness”.

  • Scarbutt  2 hours ago

    Surprised Anthropic hasn't done anything to restrict Claude Code from using other providers.

    • cortesoft  2 hours ago

      At this point in the AI wars, it is probably better to have more users of Claude code rather than restrict which LLMs it can connect to. Claude code is probably (currently at least) stickier than the LLM model itself. Getting people into the Claude code ecosystem is worth it.

      Later, they can always lock it down more or add Claude LLM only features to it.

LaurensBER  1 hour ago

It works very well with OpenCode. My team keeps hitting the 5h limits on other subscriptions and it's pretty good to have Deepseek as a backup. I just put 50 bucks on there and it feels like it'll never run out.

It's not good enough to fully replace any of the frontier models yet but it's definitely great to have as a backup!

lambda  3 hours ago

Why do you need them to provide a coding agent? Just use their model with any off the shelf coding agent. I happen to prefer Pi, but use whatever works for you.

  • alyxya  2 hours ago

    I probably have an unfounded assumption that whatever coding agent they make will work really well with their models, better than external harnesses. I don't have a good sense for how all the model + harness combinations compare, nor any good way to compare them myself, but generally believe model companies train their models to work best with their own harness.

    • wolttam  1 hour ago

      I've noticed that models have gotten less finicky with this over time. Harnesses don't need to be complex to get good coding performance from models, they just need to implement some sane primitives for code exploration and editing.

  • hootz  3 hours ago

    Yeah, I'm using Pi with their models through an OpenCode Go subscription and it works pretty well. 10 bucks and V4-Flash is virtually infinite.

  • satvikpendem  2 hours ago

    RL with the harness inputs and outputs of users is one of the primary improvers of model performance, a self perpetuating flywheel.

  • apitman  2 hours ago

    What's the best way to use it with Pi, OpenRouter?

    • schaefer  5 minutes ago

      > What's the best way to use it with Pi, OpenRouter?

      I can't claim it's "the best"...

      But the Pi.dev and OpenRouter combo is what I'm doing at home, and I love it. Setup was easy, I can use /model to switch between any of the openrouter models and whatever I'm hosting locally via VLLM.

    • lambda  8 minutes ago

      I only use local models myself personally. But yeah, OpenRouter would probably be a good option.

tequila_shot  2 hours ago

You no longer need "their coding agent". You can hook up claude code to use Deepseek. Works perfectly.

zozbot234  2 hours ago

antirez's ds4-agent works quite fine. It runs on any Apple Silicon device with 96GB RAM or more.

  • rjh29  9 minutes ago

    I wonder how many years it'll take for the API token cost to exceed the money spent on ram.

cultofmetatron  2 hours ago

open code works with them today. I've been using it fulltime for 2 weeks so far.

  • sunaookami  2 hours ago

    Using it with Pi and can only report good thing so far. I'm very impressed by how good it is (also it's way slower than Claude Sonnet and GPT-5.5 and often thinks "too much" before starting).