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Comment by ammar_x

4 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...

26 comments

ammar_x

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maxdo  41 minutes ago

I'm not curious what tasks you tested it for. Im working on coding agent writing code dynamically on request for customers. i'd say code itself very simple and aggressively cached, and patternalized, e.g. we adding lots of hints to the system.

the only real family models that work were claude and openai, surprisingly, for tasks that needs faster speed, gpt 5.4 is very impressive. Deep seek was very average , doing things somewhere in gemini flash 3.0 domain.

KronisLV  2 hours 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/

  # After installed (or when run portably with ./ccode)
  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/

rjh29  1 hour ago

How does the cost compare using the API vs the $20/month plans with other providers?

I did some back of the envelope calculations and it seems like you would pay $5/month using DeepSeek directly or $15-20 with OpenRouter or similar. But would be interested to hear real world usage.

thisisit  3 hours 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.

  • mewse-hn  1 hour ago

    I was looking into something similar because I wanted to test a local model for doing basic coding and smart model (deepseek) for planning.

    It's basically not possible with claude code, the api endpoint is a single environment variable and whatever models are on that endpoint are what's available.

    HOWEVER, if you run a proxy like LiteLLM, you can configure it to send requests to different api endpoints on the back end and expose them as different "models" on the front end, then configure claude code to switch between those virtual models.

  • maxdo  38 minutes ago

    i've been trying that, in reality every time you try to save it, it's not worth it, the cost of mistake is so high , you can spent 2-3h on just wrong assumption, you lost your time and all the burned tokens.

wiradikusuma  3 hours 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  2 hours 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)

    • rjh29  1 hour ago

      Author blocks referrals from HN, weirdly dramatic, especially considering they have 1086 karma here. I wonder what we did to them.

  • wrs  3 hours ago

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

Scarbutt  3 hours ago

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

  • HWR_14  21 minutes ago

    It went the other way, you can't use other harnesses to connect to the cheaper versions of Claude. So clearly they think their current moat is Claude Code use, not the LLM itself.

  • wolttam  3 hours ago

    The value of Claude Code the harness isn't that great. There's a lot of other good harnesses out there.

  • cortesoft  3 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.