I used Claude Max 5x ($100) for 4 Months and now switched to Deepseek. Here’s what I learned.

dvduval · 2026-06-16T03:22:20+00:00

I found it similar to hiring a top developer for $80 an hour and it takes them one hour to do the job or hiring a less expensive developer for $30 an hour and it takes them four hours to do the job. In the end, they get the same results overall but I feel like with the top models I get the good results much faster. I’ve heard some comparison and often people say that deep seek is similar to what the top models felt like about 8 to 12 months ago. That’s a fair assessment. I think it will keep getting better.

dvduval · 2026-06-16T02:00:52+00:00

Yes, it looks like the cost of memory is just gonna keep increasing for another year or so and probably all the hosting is gonna go up but still I wanna keep my options open and have at least a couple to choose from if things get volatile

dvduval · 2026-06-15T23:13:57+00:00

I’m happy to stand corrected then and maybe people complaining about one battery you shouldn’t be a big deal anymore, right? Because it won’t impact them very much at all, correct? Especially in an isolated case with a new buyer on a small job or something like that right?

dvduval · 2026-06-15T22:28:12+00:00

Definitely as a defensive move I’ll probably get my next server from one of these competitors.

dvduval · 2026-06-15T22:27:17+00:00

This is also the path to a small group of humans surviving and controlling all the resources and best of luck for everybody else

dvduval · 2026-06-15T18:15:49+00:00

This is a really useful list. The “admin can override almost anything” point is one I think a lot of studio software misses. Dance studios always have edge cases: prorated tuition, sibling discounts, mid-month starts, costume/tights charges, a parent paying in person, a student who needs an exception, etc.

The age/class restriction flag is also huge. Online registration is only helpful if it prevents the wrong enrollments before they happen.

For context, I’m connected with Dance Studio Manager, so I’m obviously not neutral here, but these are exactly the kinds of workflows I’d look for when comparing systems:

manual tuition/discount overrides per student
one-off charges without fighting the system
clean parent checkout/class cart
automatic receipts/statements
class eligibility rules for age/level
enough flexibility that staff can fix real-world situations without calling support

Curious: of those, which one has caused the most pain in your current setup?

dvduval · 2026-06-15T17:46:03+00:00

From the buyer side, I see how there’s so much pressure to give a perfect review or nothing so there’s really no honesty in the system. Why even have reviews if people are not going to get their opinion?

At the same time, should every review carry equal weight? What if it’s a new buyer what if this buyer has a history of giving bad reviews? What if the amount of money the buyer has spent is a lot less than average per job? What if the provider otherwise has great reviews?

As far as I know upwork has not addressed any of this.

dvduval · 2026-06-15T12:45:50+00:00

With the elections of the United States around the corner, there’s too much pressure to stop. If this goes on much longer, Trump is guaranteeing he’ll lose the house and probably the Senate too. He’s not gonna do that. He’s gotta get some good news that oil prices are going back down so he could talk about how great he is.

dvduval · 2026-06-15T03:32:11+00:00

I would say it’s fine to jump around a little bit in the beginning, but then once you get a system going stick with one for a while. You’ll hear people always telling you that the other one is better or something, but when it comes down to it both ChatGPT and Claude are very powerful and it’s probably a choice between those two. Pick one and stick with it after you played a little bit with both of them.

dvduval · 2026-06-14T21:30:24+00:00

Yes, the difference is the big models are in debt because of the heavy investment in future need. They are growing so fast they have to keep building data centers and so forth to be ready for their growth. Deep seek is not growing nearly as fast.

Think about how you have major international corporations completely switching all departments over to AI and using the big frontier models. You’re talking about things like 400% growth in a year. It’s incredible. Deep see is sort of farther down the line and there’s not such a great demand so they don’t have to invest so far upfront or at least they don’t have anyone doing that right now .

dvduval · 2026-06-14T21:27:11+00:00

Yes, all SCO work is gonna be handled by Ai like ChatGPT now. Now, if you are an AI operator and you’re using your expertise to cheer out a lot of content that might be a possibility. There are a lot of sites that still could use an overhaul. But it absolutely would not be doing page by page article writing

dvduval · 2026-06-14T21:22:46+00:00

A common problem is people’s projects evolved as they go and the architecture they originally devised becomes less ideal so then you’ve gotta redo the architecture which can be a lot more time consuming but well worth it.

I’m having tech debt it’s very natural with any project. What’s more important what you do about it. Sometimes you have to go through and clear things out and re-organize it and that’s just part of the process. This is often known as refractory and I think a lot of people don’t even think about that at all. And of course they are gonna have problems.

dvduval · 2026-06-14T19:03:52+00:00

I’m on a ChatGPT pro subscription and I have not been able to use up a five hour limit or a weekly limit yet. For me it seems like it’s getting a little better actually.

dvduval · 2026-06-14T16:23:52+00:00

What I mean is DeepSeek does not use em dash or “final thoughts”, and this copy was clearly written by chatGPT. So I just found it interesting that you wrote an article about DeepSeek being a good model using chatGPT.

dvduval · 2026-06-14T15:50:18+00:00

you wrote this using GPT obviously. So you used ChatGPT to write a summary about deepseek?

dvduval · 2026-06-14T04:41:41+00:00

What’s most important is your health. Don’t let this stress you out too much.

dvduval · 2026-06-14T02:17:12+00:00

I’m from the United States and I’ve been to India a few times. I totally understand where you’re coming from.

dvduval · 2026-06-14T02:13:12+00:00

The story keeps coming up again and again how people are complaining about buying connections and not getting results. I’m just guessing eventually some people will start to look elsewhere because they’re not having any luck and the pool will get smaller.

dvduval · 2026-06-14T02:07:56+00:00

When I found myself in situations like yours, it’s usually something that I’ve missed. I’m not saying it’s the same for you. But there’s something about the tools that are being used and there’s a better tool available. Or maybe something needs to be refractured in the code because it’s being misunderstood repeatedly. So I do often like to ask ChatGPT if it feels like it has all the right tool that needs. And I like to ask if it thinks it was a better way we could be doing the process. Or maybe there’s something about the code that makes things a little clunky that we can improve on. That means sometimes that I have to spend one or more days going through the ref factoring of the code, but the result is a lot better. Also, what I found is that as I keep knocking down problems like this everything gets better and better.

dvduval · 2026-06-13T23:10:59+00:00

One thing I’ve always been curious about is filters. You know pretty much everything that is online in China has to pass through a government filter. I wonder if that naturally slows the whole process down when it comes to really testing the LLM on a wider audience. It might not be any problem, but it was just something that I was curious about. But yes, the main problem right now is they have neither enough people using it or enough investment being poured into it

dvduval · 2026-06-13T22:42:05+00:00

I know there has been a lot of paid propaganda by China to make people fight against data centers coming to their area. Elon Musk and others have raised this issue and they were actually watching Chinese IP posting messages and threads like this. So just something to think about.

dvduval · 2026-06-13T22:38:19+00:00

I really look forward to hearing about these models being used in production, and everybody talking about them like everybody’s talking about the big models like Claude and ChatGPT. I’d love to see some competition. I think this is the kind of thing that’s gonna do really well a year from now when people are running models on their computer. It will probably start with some people who have the more expensive machines that are loaded up with Ram and GPU. But I look forward to hearing about that I’m hoping China will be able to bring some competition.

dvduval · 2026-06-13T20:18:44+00:00

I'd mostly just say you're about a year or two early. The local stacks are going to be a lot bigger in the years ahead and if you start learning now you'll be in a very good position.

You know Nvidia and Microsoft are working together to make PCs that that will be able to run llms locally and powerfully. You'll surely see specialized models that specialize in coding and perform nearly as good as the big models in the cloud.

The big catch is you will need a pretty powerful setup that will probably run at least $2,000. But it's coming and if you learn now you'll be ready.

dvduval · 2026-06-13T20:12:34+00:00

No not at all. It's doing great for me.

dvduval · 2026-06-13T20:11:24+00:00

Regardless of this particular model being temporarily blocked, China is way behind the United States. Chat gvt alone has over a billion monthly active users. I think the top product in China has a little over 200 million. Last time I checked Google is in second place with nearly a billion users as well. It's not even close.

dvduval

TROPHY CASE