Comment by efromvt

Deepseek cost/performance is incredible. That said, I still feel like for agentic coding we haven't plateaued (I slightly prefer GPT 5.5 to Claude for complex stuff, to be honest), and so the extra price is absolutely worth it to push you over the 'impossible' to 'feasible' bar on complex tasks. Once you're in a domain that Deepseek can handle though that requires volume, I would almost always default to it now.

For evals in particular (tuning workflows that agents are using), effectively not having to worry about price is an incredible multiplier - getting statistical significant signal is not cheap otherwise.