To me it was just a few weeks ago discovering just how good and dirt cheap the recent flash models are, in particular Deepseek V4. Previously used Claude's variants almost exclusively.

I use them mostly in the "artist's assistant" role, doing internet research, writing a occasional function and doing transformations or refactorings (don't belive the agentic hype honestly), and for such tasks they seem to be well capable enough.

It seems that their open weights nature leads to competition among providers keeping the user cost close to inference cost.

Try them at least once if you haven't, it's well worth it, and the price difference is staggering