Comment by nerdsniper

Much more bang per dollar, yes. Somewhat less bang per hour.

As usual, different models get stuck on different things. I run DeepSeek v4 API for most of my Cursor experimentation / poking around / proof of concept stuff, but I trust it less than OpenAI/Claude for writing production code. Sometimes DeepSeek is great for debugging, planning, etc. Sometimes it gets stuck or outputs low quality. That's true of OpenAI and Anthropic models as well though.

Overall, DeepSeek seems serviceable but a rung below Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5. I run them all on maximum thinking settings.