alt Hacker NewsOnce 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.
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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
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!
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.
Zed's Agent natively supports a DeepSeek API key now. (do not use it through OpenRouter if you want to save the most cost)
You no longer need "their coding agent". You can hook up claude code to use Deepseek. Works perfectly.
Give pi a try if you haven't already. Avoid vendor harness lock-in.
All the major coding agents already support DeepSeek.
antirez's ds4-agent works quite fine. It runs on any Apple Silicon device with 96GB RAM or more.
open code works with them today. I've been using it fulltime for 2 weeks so far.
Both pi, opencode and zed work amazing with deepseek.
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...