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Comment by kmike84

3 days ago

I do have this experience. I've used Claude Code (with Opus mostly), and then switched to opencode (mostly with Kimi 2.6) for my personal projects; it's based on a couple months of use.

Claude Code is better. But Opencode + kimi 2.6 is workable, which is big. For bare code writing, if you know what exactly you want, most popular models are fine (deepseek, kimi, etc), it feels more or less the same as anthropic models.

At the same time, Opus seems to understand my intent way better than e.g. deepseek. I need to be much more precise with my prompts when using deepseek - it often goes in a wrong direction if I'm lazy. This results in a workflow which feels quite a lot different from Claude Code.

Kimi is in between - for me it brings back "lazy prompting" workflow, and I can trust its plans more than deepseek. It enables a workflow similar to Claude Code, it's workable, but it is a bit worse everywhere. Smaller context, a bit more errors, decisions are a bit worse, recommendations are a bit worse, debugging capabilities are a bit worse, etc.

On the usage side, $100 Claude plan is a great value actually. On paper, per-token kimi is way cheaper, but Claude subscriptions are heavily subsidized - you get much more tokens than $100 can buy you. So, in the end, opencode + kimi vs claude code could be of a similar cost, for similar usage patterns. Deepseek can be cheaper, and it has insanely cheap cached tokens, but experience may vary - depending on your habits, you may need to adjust how you work, coming from claude code.

I'd say for side projects something like $10 Opencode Go plan + $10 of extra DeepSeek v4 credits (e.g. on OpenRouter) can be very workable.

11 comments

kmike84

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predkambrij  3 days ago

To my experience claude/codex $20 are even more subsidized, so running on sonnet or gpt5.4 again gives you more usage.

  • port11  2 days ago

    I wonder if they’re truly subsidised or if the API pricing is just massively inflated. Genuine doubt.

    My CC stats show me using almost 300$ of Sonnet tokens on the 20$ plan. Is Anthropic willing to forgo 93% of the profit? A bit less than that but API is priced, say, 3x what it should be?

    CC is great, but Sonnet (my main model) isn’t worth the API pricing. The cheap-but-good models arrive at similar results for much less (for context I’m using Aivo with CC).

    • predkambrij  2 days ago

      To my feeling, I'm getting usage of Opus (and Fable before the cut) that's greater than what I got from Sonnet last year. I reached $100 of usage when weekly was at 50%. This means, I could squeeze $800 worth of tokens for $20.

      1 reply →

    • danny_codes  2 days ago

      Anthropic is making money from people who under-utilize their subscriptions, and presumably by sneaky throttling or not-sneaky throttling power users. Currently they are in an adoption race. Whether being first will actually let them "win" the market (and the market is a bit ill-defined) is unclear.

Bnjoroge  3 days ago

This is generally been my experience as well, but i think the main reason for claude code being better at understanding intent is their massive system prompt.

htrp  3 days ago

>At the same time, Opus seems to understand my intent way better than e.g. deepseek. I need to be much more precise with my prompts when using deepseek - it often goes in a wrong direction if I'm lazy. This results in a workflow which feels quite a lot different from Claude Code.

how much of that is Opus injecting prior conversations from memory?

  • kitchi  3 days ago

    Almost none of it, if you're using Claude Code. Until recently Claude only had the option of retaining memory across conversations for the desktop app.

    I almost never use the desktop app, I have maybe 2-3 conversations over the last year that have nothing to do with my job. Opus (and now Fable) genuinely do seem to "understand" what you intend based off what you're explaining a lot better than other models I've tried.

    Gemini gets close in some cases, but it falls over in the actual implementation sometimes. I haven't tried Kimi yet but MiMo isn't too shabby either.

  • jwbron  2 days ago

    I'm using Claude code + (a patched) litellm proxy + openrouter + Qwen 3.7 max/kimi k2.6/deepseek v4 pro. The only feature that doesn't work is webfetch and web search, which I've replaced with the ddg MCP. Memory, caching, and everything else works fine.

    Qwen comes close to opus for planning but fable is clearly superior. Kimi and deepseek are pretty much indistinguishable from opus for coding if opus writes the plan.

    I'm now testing out fable for research and planning and deepseek v4 flash for coding. I'm guessing results will be pretty similar to opus + deepseek v4 pro and costs should be lower overall.