alt Hacker NewsPersonally I've found Deepseek v4 Flash to be as useful to me as Opus. But I don't do these silly one shot tech demos. I have the technical understanding to ask for exactly the change I want with the right terminology. I loaded up some credit on openrouter and it took me ages to hit $1 in spend.
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I use Claude at work; provided by my employer. I pay DeepSeek on a personal capacity.
I honestly have a better experience using DeepSeek, in part because since the cost is lower I feel more free to experiment with it. But in part because the model is excellent, and can handle everything I throw at it in a collaborative manner.
I am really excited for when V4 is out of preview and they are done with all the post-training bit.
Do you use DeepSeek for both planning and building or do you have a preferred builder? I've been looking into moving from Cursor to OpenCode, or at least have Opencode for when my allocated usage for the month is done.
Which harness? I tried Kimi on Opencode Go and after an hour I hit my 5 hr limit and went back to Codex.
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I’m the exact same way. $15 on openrouter lasted me so long it would’ve got me fired at FAANG. Despite this, my number of commits is dramatically higher. Small, beautifully scoped changes is just good software development, and good for the wallet as well.
I think the issue is that no one is content with incremental progress. We all know one shots are mostly possible, so the age of the personal project is kind of over. There’s no motive to invest dozens of hours getting a working prototype when Claude can give you something right now. So you can’t make small changes until you have that codebase in place already. You’re forced to make sweeping changes if you use AI from the beginning. And it’s not like it matters, there’s no personal attachment to any one part of the code, it’s not even seen!