Don't know what you're doing, but it's good enough for the reasonably sized tasks I give LLMs. It's also a much better price. My browser stopped rendering the UI frame recently because I messed up permissions on /usr/share/icons. Took DS 4.1 flash about 3 minutes and a few cents to diagnose it. Same harness with opus 5 took twice as long and several dollars.

Moreover, the months I've used anthropic/OAI exclusively my API token costs are in the hundreds (or sometimes thousands). With DS flash as the first agent I reach for, I rarely exceed $40/mo.

This has always been a problem with the Internet. When the iPad was released, anti-Apple subreddits talked about what a garbage device it was. Wishful thinking dominates a lot of human content generators. Extracting information from humanslop is harder than avoiding it entirely.

I've had significant success using DS 4 Pro and now 4.1 flash for fairly complex coding tasks on C++, Rust and Python projects at home.

I have access to Claude Code at work (and use it quite a bit), so I feel I can honestly compare them.

You do have to plan things first a bit more with DS (than say Opus can (Opus will have more chance of one-shotting something, although I generally don't think that's a good idea), although it often over-engineers and tries to be too helpful in my experience) and be a bit more explicit at times, but I feel it's quite close to Sonnet in performance for implementing plans, debugging issues and explaining how codebases work.

Assume about 50% of internet writing has zero tether to reality and is written out of pure motivation to shape a preferred narrative (and usually the same one).

When you see this your worldview will instantly become much clearer.

Hard to say if you don't share what kind of project, workflow and prompt you're trying tbh. I've been driving it mainly to write a quite big golang and android app and most of the tasks are all handled fine by DeepSeek.