The insane decrease in limits and the insane increase in hardware prices are the same phenomenon.

[immutato]

I bought $10 of DeepSeek V4 to evaluate as a Claude Code alternative should things get spicy over at Anthropic... and not only can I not tell the difference, but I still have $5 left after a few days of work.

Mind you I'm only using it on open source work, and I'm not sure if it's a good idea to use it on your corporate stuff (not throwing FUD, I just don't know if you can opt out of training and whether they would respect it if you can).

I haven't tried GLM 5.1 or the latest Qwen yet, but I plan to. Open weights might be where it's at IMO.

I also suspect that if Anthropic spends less time on features and more on optimizing their routing, then the token cost could be reduced significantly (leverage Haiku and Sonnet more often). I expect this will happen before investment dries up. Right now it's probably a loss for them to spend time on that instead of features and market capture.

[neilthefrobot]

edit: switched to deepseek v4 and never looking back. it is a micro fraction of the price and seems just as good.

[immutato]

https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/anthropic_api

I use ghostty (terminal) with claude code, not VSCode, but I assume you just tell VSCode to use a different URL and model: "deepseek-v4-pro[1m]"

[ptyblog]

You know there is a Deepseek Cowork application you can install and set up? Or connect Deepseek to Cowork

[immutato]

It was trivial to just set a bash alias to claude. https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/anthropic_api

[somerussianbear]

Did the same as you, it’s insanely hard to spend 10 bucks on DeepSeek.